


the carbon in our apple pies

by whatsinausername



Category: The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: (No one you love don't worry), Adventure, Alternate Universe - Future, Alternate Universe - Space, Angst, Bad Science, Canonical Character Death, First Kiss, First Time, Fluff, Found Family, Friendship, Happy Ending, Idiots in Love, Love Confessions, M/M, Pining, Romance, SPACE CRIME, Sharing a Bed, Slow Burn, Speed Force, Superpowers, aka Cisco is an accidental astronaut and Harry is a hologram, so get ready for shit to get w i l d, this concept is based on a dream i had, this one's got it all folks!
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-18
Updated: 2019-03-30
Packaged: 2019-08-25 06:03:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 16
Words: 53,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16655593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whatsinausername/pseuds/whatsinausername
Summary: There was a spaceship that had never taken off. It was supposed to, of course. But on the day of the launch, something went wrong. And the generation of children that watched its mission fail horrifically became a generation of adults, full of the bitter nostalgia that comes with knowing what could have been. And one night, four of those idiots decide that if no one is using the ship, there's no reason they shouldn’t be allowed to use it themselves.In which Cisco and his friends accidentally steal a spaceship, meet a grumpy hologram named Harry, sail across the universe, foil some evil plans, and maybe -- if they can swing it -- save the galaxy.





	1. We Weren't Even Apes Then

**Author's Note:**

> That's right, I'm back at it with the extremely specific and high-concept AUs! I'm really fucking excited about this idea and this world, and I hope the rest of you will get to be, too. Updates will probably come weekly, as I have a big kid job now and don't want to lose it because I spent too much time writing gay space fluff. Comments will make my entire life, if you feel inclined to leave them!

“Well, there’s no turning back now.”

“Actually, Cisco,” Caitlin whispered, “I think this would be the perfect time to turn back, if we wanted to.”

Cisco shot her some withering stink-eye as the last gate slid open with a metallic _clunk_. “Seriously, Scully?”

Iris clapped Caitlin on the shoulder. “I think Cisco means it in the more symbolic sense, Cait.”

She strode past Caitlin and through the gate, Barry following on her heels. Cisco held out his hand to Caitlin. “C’mon,” he said. “I didn’t just hack into an encrypted government security system for you to give up on me now.”

A smile twitched across Caitlin’s face. She took his hand, and he pulled her through the gate.

And there it was, looming over them like a skyscraper, black against the starry sky. Cisco nearly bumped into Barry and Iris, who had stopped just inside the wall to stare up at the thing, so he and Caitlin stopped too, and did the same.

 _Damn,_ it was beautiful. Probably the most beautiful thing ever built by people, Cisco thought, just as he had when he’d seen the spaceshipon TV all those years ago. Everything about _Providence I_ was darkly glittering ceramic quartz and gracefully curving lines; the way the wide, winged base swooped upward into the almost delicately pointed nose was sheer artistry. And it was _there_ , right in front of him, just like he’d always impossibly dreamed, and it stirred something deep inside him. It was wonder, yeah, of course he was in _awe_ of it like any self-respecting nerd would be -- but it was also something that he couldn’t quite remember feeling since he was a kid, watching the lead-up to the launch on TV. Hope, maybe. Faith in humanity, even.

“Alright, gang,” Iris said, knocking them all out of their reveries. “Let’s go.”

They all speed-walked toward the ship, trying not to crunch their feet on the accumulated leaves and trash of twenty years that drifted across the tarmac, very aware of how exposed they were in such a wide open space. Barry’s head swiveled like a hypermobile owl’s, keeping an eye out for guards that definitely, probably, almost certainly weren’t there. No one broke into abandoned government sites surrounded by thirty-foot walls with ten layers of security clearance, after all. Cisco almost told Barry to chill, but he knew his friend -- Barry would never _chill_ while there was even the slightest possibility that they were in danger. 

Plus, the place was kind of spooky. No harm in keeping an eye out. 

When they reached the _Providence_ , Iris stood aside and waved Cisco toward the entrance to the external elevator tower that still stood clamped onto the ship. Cisco cracked his knuckles and got to work on the lock. Another retinal scanner, another cascade cipher. More old-ass software that Cisco could crack in his sleep. 

“This is practically an insult to my intelligence,” he muttered, just as the door slid open. Iris brushed past him and through it, leading Barry and Caitlin along with her. “Hey, I just said a cool thing. Did you guys hear the cool thing I just said?”

Barry laughed. “Get in here, Matthew Broderick.” Cisco grinned back and bounded into the elevator.

“Right, _Weird Science_ ,” Iris said, pushing the single, dramatically large button on the wall panel. The doors swished shut.

Cisco rounded on her, mouth open. “Uh, whoa there --”

“It’s _WarGames,_ babe,” Barry mumbled as the elevator lurched upward, clattering in a way that was only a little bit worrying. “But, like” -- he nudged Cisco in the shoulder, cutting off whatever he was about to indignantly say -- “it doesn’t matter.”

And it didn’t, not at all, because then they were flying stories and stories into the air, and Cisco got distracted by the surface of the _Providence_ whizzing past them almost close enough to touch. He pressed his nose to the elevator window, watching wide-eyed as they passed the rockets, the wings, the name of the ship in silver letters taller than Barry twice over -- and then the hatch that led to the flight deck. And the elevator was stopping, and the door was opening, and they had arrived.

\---

_Now, children, come on over here. I’m going to tell you a bedtime story. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I’ll begin._

_(That was another_ WarGames _reference. Whatever. It seemed relevant. Forget it.)_

_There was a spaceship that had never taken off. It was supposed to, of course, full of people and food bound for another world. It was going to be the first mission of its kind, the first with the goal of putting a population on an exoplanet. It was going to be the ship that would launch humanity into a new age._

_There was a generation of children who grew up watching this ship on television. Who saw the scientists as they planned, the engineers as they built, the passengers as they prepared; who were raised on the delirious idea of the human race bouncing its way across the galaxy. They knew that this ship would change everything; that even if they weren’t on it, they would be on another one someday. This generation could dream as no other had ever been able to -- of distant worlds, of impossible creatures, of uncovering the secrets of the universe._

_And then, on the day of the launch, something went wrong. To this day, nobody on Earth knows exactly what happened. Oh, there are theories, each one stupider than the last. But the only thing anyone knows for sure is that the dark matter engine was engaged, and there was a blinding flash of light, and then every passenger on the ship was gone. Not dead. Not vaporized. Just gone, as if they had never been there. And a generation of children watched it happen on live TV._

_So the_ Providence I _mission was cancelled, obviously. And even though everything else on the ship was intact -- systems, engines, food stores, all of it -- no one wanted to try again. So the space agency just… left it there. As a monument to whatever the fuck_ that _was. And maybe, sort of, as a warning._

 _And that generation of children became a generation of adults, full of the bitter nostalgia that comes with knowing what could have been. And they never got over that loss, that wistful grief, that desperate sense of_ if only. _Many of them thought, privately, that another mission would be worth the risks. Some of them argued, loudly, that they were owed another shot at the stars._

 _And four of them decided, idiotically, that if no one was using the_ Providence, _there was no reason they shouldn’t be allowed to use it themselves._

\---

The flight deck was better than they ever could have imagined. The lights came on automatically as the four of them climbed through the hatch, and they could see it in all its glory: brightly-colored buttons and dusty screens covering every inch of the piloting console and the steel-gray walls, two enormous chairs outfitted with straps and even more toggles, and a window taking up most of the wall that the chairs faced, through which they could see the night sky and the empty, rolling plains surrounding the complex. 

They all stood and looked for a moment, mouths hanging open. And then Cisco couldn’t take it anymore.

“Dibs on the captain’s chair!” he called -- but Iris flung a hand out to catch him in the chest before he could go anywhere.

“Wait,” she said. “We have to be careful. Methodical. We have a plan, remember?”

Barry nodded. “Search the ship for clues, and don’t touch anything that might get us zapped out of existence.”

Cisco sighed and tucked his hair back behind his ear. “I _am_ a fan of existing.”

“Right.” Iris smiled at him in her reassuring way. “You can sit in the chair later.”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

Iris walked across the deck slowly, as if the floor was a frozen lake that could swallow her up at any moment, and stopped in front of a steel door across from the window. She bent down to look at the button next to it.

“I think we can safely assume,” Cisco said, with only a trace of sarcasm in his voice, “that the button opens the door, and doesn’t start up the dark matter engine that’s gonna kill us all.”

Iris wrinkled her nose at him and pushed the button. The door slid open with a _whoosh_ and a _ding_ , revealing another elevator. Iris stuck her head in and peered around.

“Alright,” she said. “Where do we want to go first?”

“Ooh, living quarters!” Caitlin said.

“Science lab?” Barry offered.

“Engine bay, engine bay, _engine bay_ \--”

“I agree with Cisco,” Iris said, cutting off his chanting. “The dark matter engine is probably what caused the incident, so we should look there first.”

“Thank you!” Cisco nudged past her into the elevator and held his finger over the bottommost button marked _E_. “Come on, slowpokes, I wanna see the greatest engineering achievement mankind has ever devised. And you _know_ I’m gonna need some alone time with her.”

\---

 _It had started as a joke, initially. A hypothetical, spoken into the air one night when they’d all had a few too many of Allen’s notoriously lethal dark ‘n’ stormies. They were grad students at Central City University, young and exhausted and too smart for their own good, and in that moment it was the funniest idea any of them had ever heard. “What if we broke into_ Providence I _?” Hilarious._

_But then that joke became a conversation that kept them all up into the early morning, and it stopped being funny and started being exhilarating, the idea that they could steal into the most infamous graveyard in the world, and -- what? See if the engine still worked? Find out where the passengers had gone? They didn’t know, but that night the four of them felt more driven, more inspired, more alive than they had felt since they were kids, watching the broadcasts. They were goners._

_From there, it became a project, a word problem to be worked out together on Saturday nights, sitting on the floor of their living room surrounded by empty pizza boxes and notepads full of equations and crackpot theories. They were all perfectly matched, all had something to contribute: Caitlin Snow, the med student, with her ideas about what dark matter might have done to all those human bodies. Barry Allen, working toward his master’s in forensic science, with an eye for detail and a mind for solving mysteries. Iris West, the most brilliant student the School of Journalism had seen in years, with her encyclopedic knowledge of the mission’s history and her anonymous blog if they ever found something worth sharing with the world. And Cisco Ramon, who was halfway through a dual PhD at CC Tech, who could do anything if it involved machines or computers, and who was the only reason the rest of them could even consider the possibility of getting anywhere near the ship._

_It stayed a “what if” scenario, technically speaking. Until one night, Ramon said “when.” When we do it. When we break into_ Providence I. _And they all went quiet, waiting to see if anyone else would correct him. And when no one did, they carried on._

\---

No automatic lights came on when they entered the engine bay. Barry took a flashlight out of his backpack and shone it around as the elevator door closed and left them in almost total darkness. From what Cisco could see, the space was positively cavernous -- the ceiling stretched at least thirty feet above their heads, and rows and rows of server stacks and other machines he couldn’t even begin to comprehend towered over them, some of their lights still blinking icy blue.

“Guys,” he whispered, since a reverent whisper seemed the right way to go, “I think I’m in heaven.”

“Awfully dark for heaven,” Caitlin whispered back, though she sounded just as astounded as he was.

And then Barry swung the beam of the flashlight down another aisle and _there_ \-- there was the dark matter engine, and Cisco was sure his brain would explode. 

They had never shown the engine itself on TV, see, because it was top fucking secret, because no one outside the research team could be trusted with that kind of technology. Which twenty-seven-year-old Cisco understood, on a cerebral level, but the piece of seven-year-old Cisco that still lived inside him was screaming out in smug euphoria --

 _I’m looking at it, you jerks, and there’s nothing you can do about it_ \--

because there it _was,_ massive and shining even under the dust of two decades, a hulking patchwork ring of fiberglass and metal standing on its edge, reaching almost to the ceiling. As Cisco drew closer, his eyes drinking in every detail Barry’s annoyingly small flashlight managed to illuminate, he almost would have believed that the engine was prehistoric, eternal, some kind of portal to another dimension that the ancients had built and worshipped. 

Caitlin crept up next to him and squeezed his hand. “It’s really something,” she said softly. Cisco nodded. “How do you think it works?”

“No idea,” he breathed. Then, louder: “I’ve gotta touch it.”

“Cisco,” Iris called out from behind him, “I don’t think that’s --”

“You want me to find out if the engine had anything to do with the passengers blinking out, right?” Cisco marched over toward the base of the thing, glancing back at Iris’ concerned face. “I’m gonna have to get all up in its business to do that.”

She met his eyes and must have seen all the endless determination in them, because she nodded, though her frown didn’t go away. Cisco heard Barry murmuring soothing words to her as he turned back to the engine.

The ring was twice as thick as he was tall, and up close he could see that it was built from several giant fiberglass tubes, held together with countless criss-crossing wires and overlapping panels of titanium alloy. The tubes made him think of particle accelerators -- surely they were dark energy conduits, or pathways for the axions and neutrinos. If he could just see where they intersected, he might be able to tell what kind of reaction was meant to happen, and if he could figure out where the newly-generated energy went --

he reached out with one hand and touched the smooth surface of one of the tubes, couldn’t be any harm in that --

and then the air itself _vibrated_ in a concussive blast that blew him backward.

And there was a deafening rumble, a mechanical whine that quickly rose in pitch, and Cisco had only a second to raise himself onto his elbows and see that the others had also been knocked to the ground, were dazedly struggling to push themselves up, before --

 _flash_ , the dark matter engine ignited with swirling, dazzling light, streams of sparking particles flowing through the glass tubes and around the ring. And Cisco shielded his eyes to look, because how could he _not,_ and saw that there was also something happening in the center of the ring, in the empty space. Something was forming there, a spiraling vortex that his eyes were seeing but his brain wasn’t quite understanding, because it looked a little like purple light but it wasn’t, it was _darker_ than light --

“ _Cisco!_ ” Iris screamed over the noise. “ _The rockets are starting!_ ”

That’s what it took for Cisco to realize that, _duh_ , the floor beneath them was shuddering. So he scrambled to his feet, pulled Caitlin up by her hand, and followed Iris when she gestured at him and the others to _run_.

Barry had dropped the flashlight somewhere, but the engine was glowing bright enough that they could see their way through the stacks to the elevator, which _dinged_ open for them far too pleasantly when Caitlin jammed the button. They piled in, Cisco twisting around to get one last glimpse of the engine -- 

and _shit_ he was looking at dark matter, wasn’t he, in the vortex, that was what it looked like -- 

and then the door closed, and Iris whirled on him.

“What did you _do?_ ”

“Nothing, you saw me, I just touched the glass!”

Iris scraped a hand across her scalp, pulling at her hair. “The rockets. They’re -- we’re going to take off, Cisco, we have to stop it --”

“I know, I know, but -- but if we lift off there’ll be no way to stop without crashing everything down --”

“You’re the genius, _figure it out!_ ”

Cisco’s throat caught, whatever he would have said killed by the frantic rage on Iris’ face. She must have seen the hurt on his, because she grabbed him by the shoulders and looked into his eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry, but Cisco --”

And then the door _dinged_ open again onto the flight deck, and they all tumbled out. The rumbling of the rockets was quieter here, farther away, but still growing louder. Iris dragged Cisco over to the captain’s chair, and he gave himself a fraction of a second to appreciate the irony before he started pressing screens. They all lit up at his touch, and only some of them gave readouts that were _completely_ incomprehensible to him. 

“Barry,” he called out, “on the wall, there might be something like a kill switch, see if you can find it.” Cisco heard Barry follow his instructions as he himself pounded every button in the neighborhood of a screen that read _thrusters_ above some terrifyingly large numbers. “Caitlin, see if you can find anything that looks like it’ll access the ship’s main computer. Iris?”

“Yeah,” Iris said, sinking into the co-pilot’s seat next to him without needing to be told.

“See if there’s still a radio connection to -- I don’t know, the base, the _White House_ , anything.”

Iris clamped the seat’s enormous headphones over her ears, grimaced, pressed a few buttons. “I just hear buzzing.”

“Okay, no worries.” Cisco tried to breathe, tried to focus on reading all the screens in front of him at once, tried to remember which buttons he hadn’t tried --

“Cisco,” Barry said, “I can’t find any --”

“The computer, Cisco, I don’t know if I can --”

And then the world _lurched_ , and Cisco knew they were lifting off. He turned, made horrified eye contact with Iris, heard Barry and Caitlin cry out as they were knocked off their feet --

“Barry, Caitlin, get against a wall!” he shouted over the sound of the rockets, hoping they could hear him, praying he wasn’t about to watch his friends die from the g-force. “Whatever you do, _keep your backs straight!_ ”

They nodded, scrambled to the wall behind him. Cisco tried to keep _doing_ things, tried to find something that would take him into the main system instead of just giving him pieces of it, tried to ignore the roaring and the sight of the stars sliding past the window faster and faster --

and then he had a thought, and it was maybe the stupidest thought he’d ever had, but hey, this was a _goddamn spaceship_ \--

“ _Computer!_ ” he yelled.

And then a man with dark hair and glasses appeared in front of him, wearing a black sweater and black jeans and standing calmly in front of the window with his arms crossed.

And then the man _flickered_ , like an image on a busted television. He seemed unbothered by this. 

“What?” he asked grouchily, his rasping voice somehow audible over everything. “What did you do, idiot?”


	2. Givin' Her All She's Got, Captain

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I wrote this chapter in a single goddamn day because I was having a gay nerd breakdown over NASA's announcement of new moon and Mars missions. Anyway, enjoy your space husbands, as promised!

Cisco blinked, breathed hard. “Are you the computer?”

The hologram hesitated, his eyebrows knitting together like he had to think about it. “Apparently.”

“Well, can you _stop the ship?_ ” Cisco shouted over the noise, gripping the sides of his seat as the pressure built against his fragile, squishy body.

“No, I can’t,” the not-man growled. “And I think you know why.”

“Wait!” Iris interrupted. Cisco turned his head with some difficulty to face her; she was looking at the hologram with wide eyes. “You’re Harrison Wells!”

“ _Doctor_ Harrison Wells.” He pushed his hologram-glasses up his hologram-nose, and Cisco suddenly remembered where he had seen him before. How could he have forgotten? “And technically, no,” the hologram continued, “but I _am_ a perfectly programmed replica of his consciousness. So, for simplicity’s sake, yes. You may think of me as Dr. Harrison Wells.”

“You’re the guy from TV,” Cisco said through gritted teeth. “You were the head of the _Providence_ crew. The captain.”

Dr. Harrison Wells flicked his bright blue eyes over to Cisco. “That’s right. So, if we’re being technical, you’re sitting in my chair.”

Cisco couldn’t believe that he was about to spend his last moments being insulted by a dead man in a computer, but before he could say anything to that effect, Iris yelled at Dr. Wells for him. “If you’re the computer, are you going to _do_ anything?”

The hologram shrugged. “At this point in the trajectory, with the ship” -- he paused again, squinting into the middle distance -- “oh, about sixty-four kilometers in the air, there’s not much I _can_ do without, you know, killing you all.” His eyes landed on Barry and Caitlin, who were still pressed against the back wall like swatted flies. “I can bring out the extra chairs for your companions. If that would help.”

“ _Yes!_ ” Cisco and Iris shouted in unison.

Dr. Wells gave a little jerk of his head, and out of the corner of his eye Cisco saw a panel in the floor that he hadn’t noticed slide open. Two more big, padded chairs rose out of it, and Caitlin and Barry reached for them, dragged themselves into the seats. Cisco sensed rather than heard it as they exhaled in relief.

He refocused on the hologram, who still looked aggressively unfazed by everything. “Okay,” Cisco said, “riddle me this, asshole --”

“You could thank me,” Dr. Wells cut in, “for saving your friends. Or at least their spines.”

“Are you _serious_ right now?”

“It would be the polite thing to do.”

“ _Tell me,_ ” Cisco bellowed, “ _what is going to happen to us._ ”

Dr. Wells sighed, heavy and beleaguered. “In the short term? You’re on track to achieve escape velocity with, I’m thinking, minimal-to-survivable damage to your circulatory and nervous systems --”

“ _What now?_ ” Iris yelled, and Cisco was sure he heard Caitlin swear behind him.

“It’s not my fault you decided to launch yourselves into the stratosphere without taking any safety precautions,” Dr. Wells said, frowning down his nose at Iris before continuing as if she hadn’t interrupted him. “Long term, once you leave the Oort Cloud the dark matter engine will kick you into sub-lightspeed, and you should arrive at Proxima Centauri B in precisely seven years, three months, and twenty-four days.”

The edges of Cisco’s vision started to go gray, whether from the panic or the g-force he couldn’t tell. “This isn’t happening,” he muttered, more to himself than anything. “This _can’t_ be happening, we can’t go to space, to another solar system --”

“Yeah, well, I’m not too happy about being a _computer_ ,” he heard Dr. Wells grumble just before he blacked out, “but we’ll all just have to muddle through.”

\---

_Here’s what everyone on Earth knows about the late Harrison Wells. They’re all disgustingly misinformed, of course, but that’s not entirely their fault._

_Any massive, public undertaking that involves a lot of taxpayer money needs a human face. For the_ Providence I _project, that face was Dr. Harrison Wells. He was an exceptional physicist, a veteran of the Deep Space Gateway missions to Mars and Europa, the obvious choice to lead the most carefully selected and extensively trained crew in history. It didn’t hurt that he had an adorable and equally exceptional teenage daughter who was coming along on the mission, or that he looked good in a suit and could be blindingly charming when he needed to be._

_It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Dr. Harrison Wells was a major reason the world fell so hard for the_ Providence _mission. It was going to be a big fucking deal no matter what, obviously. But Wells gave them a hero to revere, an avatar to project themselves onto, a friend to make them feel like they understood what was happening in those deepest, darkest halls of impossible science and government secrets._

_(They didn’t understand. Not by a long shot. But the important thing was that they thought they did.)_

_When Dr. Harrison Wells disappeared on Launch Day, he was mourned just a little bit more than the rest of his crew, because humans are pathetically inept at processing large-scale tragedy. Wings of universities were named after him. He got a statue in front of the Air and Space Museum. And for years afterward, people like Cisco Ramon, even if they didn’t consciously realize it, applied to engineering schools so they could one day be just like him._

_Here’s what only four people on Earth (though they won’t be on Earth much longer) know about the late Harrison Wells:_

_In the months leading up to the launch, he spent what precious spare time he had uploading every gigabyte of his brain processes into_ Providence _’s operating system. Which was an odd thing to do, considering that Wells thought he was about to spend the next seven years, three months, and twenty-four days on that ship_. _So there was no reason to make a copy of himself._

_Unless he thought something else._

\---

When Cisco began to come to, he didn’t feel anything. It wasn’t that his nerve endings had gone numb or anything -- no, he could still wiggle his fingers, and he had a _shredding_ headache -- but he wasn’t touching anything. No floor under his feet, no pillow under his head, no chair under his --

Cisco’s eyes flew open. He was still on the flight deck, because clearly the universe hated him. He was floating, drifting weightless a few feet over the chair he’d been sitting in, his hair swirling all around his head. And through the window he could see a curving, fuzzy blue strip of the Earth’s horizon, and above it, nothing but black.

“Guys,” he said aloud, his voice echoing weakened and hoarse around the silent room, “I think we’re well and truly boned.”

No one answered. Cisco twisted his neck to the right and saw Iris, still unconscious and hovering above the pilot console. He knew that Barry and Caitlin must be behind him, but no matter how he paddled his limbs or contorted his back, he couldn’t spin himself around to look at them.

_Okay. Small problems first. Then the big problem._

Wondering why he ever let anyone tell him that zero-gravity was a fun and cool situation to be in, he tried and failed to tuck his hair behind his ears before folding his knees into his chest so he could untie one of his sneakers. Once he had it off and in his hand, he wound up, said a little prayer that it wouldn’t hit any important buttons, and threw the shoe at the window.

It worked just like Cisco had known it would -- _thank you, Isaac Newton, you brilliant gay bastard_ \-- and he drifted slowly backward in the opposite direction of the sneaker. It was a lot lazier of a pace than he would have liked, but after a few moments he passed Barry’s suspended form, then Caitlin’s, just before he bounced back-first against the rear wall. They were both still unconscious, like Iris, but all three of them looked like all the important parts of their bodies were still in the right place, so Cisco’s heart stopped palpitating.

“Hey, Computer?” he called out.

A _pop_ , and there was Dr. Harrison Wells, arms still crossed, mouth still set in an unamused line, standing on the floor as if to taunt him.

“What?”

“Are you gonna be like that every time we call you?” Cisco asked, trying to project authority despite the fact that he was slowly rotating sideways relative to the hologram. “Because I don’t know if I wanna deal with your prickly-ass attitude for seven years or whatever.”

Dr. Wells glowered at him. “Only if you keep calling me _computer_.”

“What, you don’t like that? What if I did it in my Scotty voice? I can do the accent and everything --”

“I have a _name_ , dickface.”

Cisco went quiet, partly because internationally-renowned astronaut and genius Harrison Wells had just called him a dickface. But also because, he thought a bit abashedly, twenty-seven years of watching _Star Trek_ should have prepared him for the possibility that this hologram would have feelings. Even if this hologram was also kind of an ass.

“Okay, sorry,” he said in what he hoped was an honestly apologetic tone, “but I’m not yelling _Dr. Harrison Wells_ every time I wanna talk to you. Can I call you Harry?”

The hologram blinked at him. If Cisco hadn’t known any better he would have said he looked surprised, but then his faced settled back into its regular, mildly aggravated frown. “Sure. Whatever.”

“I’m Cisco Ramon.”

“I’m calling you Ramon.”

“Very British boarding school, I’m into it. So, Harry,” Cisco said, spitting hair out of his mouth and trying to ignore the fact that he was now fully upside-down, “you may have noticed that my friends and I are in a bit of a situation here.”

“Yeah.”

“Is there anything you can do to _help us?_ ”

“I could engage the artificial gravity.”

“There’s artificial gravity?” Cisco’s arms flailed involuntarily. “Why haven’t you engaged it, like, yesterday?”

“I didn’t want you all to fall and injure yourselves,” Harry said gruffly, which almost made Cisco soften a little towards him, at least until he kept talking. “If you had strapped yourselves into your seats like, I don’t know, people with brains --”

“Hey now --”

“-- then we wouldn’t be having this conversation, and I’m sure we’d both be a lot happier for it.”

Cisco pinched the bridge of his nose, trying not to think about how much more his head would hurt when he landed on it. “You know what, just do it. Caitlin’s a doctor. Sort of. We’ll be fine.”

“Okay.” And before Cisco could so much as put his arms out to break his fall, Harry had flicked his head and the floor had come up and whacked Cisco in the face. He heard the others hit the floor, too -- heard Barry yelp as he landed on his chair and rolled off, actually -- and then he heard Caitlin’s groan and Iris’ whispered “ _Jesus fuck_ ,” and he couldn’t even be mad, because he knew they were all safe.

Rolling onto his back, he saw Harry walk with silent footsteps to stand over Caitlin, who was pushing herself up to a sitting position.

“Are you Caitlin the doctor, sort-of?” Harry barked at her.

“Yes?” Caitlin said, like she wasn’t quite conscious enough yet to be sure.

“You should examine your accomplices for head injuries and g-force shock. Meet me in the med bay and I’ll. Um. Answer any questions you might have.”

And with a tiny sigh, Harry _popped_ away again. Caitlin turned to stare at Cisco, her eyebrows crawling up towards her hair, and Cisco couldn’t find it in him to do anything but shrug back at her.

\---

Cisco saw Caitlin’s knees literally go weak when the elevator deposited them in the glittering med bay. She ran over to a shiny metal pod he was pretty sure was an MRI machine (except this was space, so maybe it tested your blood for comet juice, Cisco didn’t know) and ran her hands over it.

“Great, so it’s only me that dooms us all when I touch the cool shit, good to know,” he muttered so Caitlin wouldn’t hear. 

He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned to see Barry smiling softly down at him. “Listen, Cisco,” he said, “don’t beat yourself up about it.”

Cisco felt tears prick stupidly at his eyelashes and blinked, hard. “Why shouldn’t I, though?” he whispered, suddenly panicked all over again. “We’re _stuck_ here, Barry, and we -- we’re never gonna --”

His throat seized up then, because _God_ they were never going back to Earth, were they? _Providence_ wasn’t designed to turn around or come back once it landed, it was always going to be a one-way trip, that was what all those people had signed up for, and now --

“Hey. Hey,” Barry murmured, taking Cisco by both shoulders and leaning down to look him square in the eye. “It’s not your fault, alright? We all decided to come here and mess with the engine together. And I know that Iris seemed mad back there.” Barry glanced at his girlfriend, so Cisco did too, and saw Iris nodding along as Caitlin chattered away about oscillating magnetic fields and cortical laminar necrosis. Both of their smiles were a little desperate, both of their hands twitching fretfully.

Barry turned back to Cisco. “But listen. What she’s gonna need, what we’re _all_ gonna need, is for you to be on your A-game, okay? We’re not gonna make it without that genius brain of yours.” Barry bopped him on the forehead, which got a watery smile out of him. “So stay with us.”

Cisco nodded. Barry gave him a glowing smile and clapped him on the shoulder, and they walked together toward the women. 

Caitlin perked up as they approached. “Cisco, how did you summon that Wells hologram? Computer?”

_Pop_. “What did I _just_ tell you?” 

Caitlin and Iris whirled around to see Harry leaning against the MRI machine, glaring at them.

“Dude, slow your roll, I haven’t gotten a chance to debrief them yet.” Harry’s eyes narrowed when they met Cisco’s, and Cisco got the very skeevy feeling that Harry could tell he was just barely holding back tears, even though that was silly, because Cisco was an absolute legend at holding back tears. He distracted himself by gesturing dramatically between his friends and Harry. “Guys,” he said, “this is Harry. I’ve been informed that calling him _computer_ is not very polite.”

Harry’s eyes un-narrowed, which Cisco took as win.

“Harry,” he continued, “these are my friends and, uh, partners in space crime. Barry Allen, who’s sort of a CSI, Caitlin Snow, who’s sort of a doctor, as you know, and Iris West, who’s sort of a journalist and definitely the most badass of all of us.”

Harry nodded at the others, eyes still on Cisco. “And what about you, Ramon?” he said. “What are you, sort of?”

“Um, a computer wizard slash engineer? If that wasn’t clear from my _inspired_ gambit with the sneaker.”

Harry’s eyes narrowed again, but in a smiley way, almost, right before Caitlin stepped forward and poked at Harry’s arm. Her finger slid right through, and Harry fizzed staticky again. He trained his testy gaze on her instead.

“Do that again, Snow, and even your half a medical degree won’t save you.”

Caitlin cocked her head. “Was the real Dr. Wells this grumpy? Why would he have programmed you like this?”

“Why don’t you ask him?” Harry growled.

“We can’t do that, Harry,” Iris said, something dawning and soft on her face.

“Why not?”

“Because Dr. Wells disappeared with the rest of the crew.”

Harry froze. Every line in his face deepened as his eyes bored into Iris. “What do you mean,” he said in a barely audible whisper, “they disappeared?”

“On Launch Day,” Cisco said around his suddenly dry throat. Harry looked back at him, and his blue eyes might have been watery, except he was a hologram, that was stupid, so Cisco pressed on. “They turned the engine on and everyone on the ship just. Vanished.”

Harry slumped against the machine. He looked so _empty_. He’d had -- Wells had, anyway, though the distinction didn’t seem important -- a daughter on the ship, Cisco remembered with a sinking feeling. He almost didn’t want to bother him, but he had to know, had to ask --

“Do you know why that might have happened?”

Harry paused again to think, for much longer this time, his eyes flicking almost imperceptibly back and forth. And then they stopped, and his shoulders sagged. “No.”

Cisco heard a collective exhale from his friends. “Nothing?”

“Nothing.” Harry straightened up, apparently deciding that the time for telegraphing his actual feelings was over, and scanned the group imperiously. “But _you_ imbeciles knew what could happen, and you still started up the engine.”

There he went again, eliminating the possibility of liking him. Cisco opened his mouth to rage at Harry, or maybe to start crying again, but Caitlin cut him off, trying to change the subject as subtly as an eighteen-wheeler skidding into a U-turn. “Oh, Harry, I almost forgot! Where are the blood pressure monitors?”

Harry jerked a thumb at a table to the right of the machine, which left Cisco an opening. “That’s right, I’ve been meaning to ask you,” he shot back, “why in the name of _everything that is good and holy_ did someone design a dark matter engine to turn on at the _touch of a hand?_ ”

Harry’s brow furrowed. “The touch of a hand?”

“A brush. A caress. A gentle graze of lover’s fingers.” Cisco stood aside to let Caitlin bustle noisily past him so she could noisily put the blood pressure cuff on Barry’s arm, not breaking his eye contact with Harry. “I wasn’t anywhere near a switch or a big red button or anything. I put my hand on one of those axion tubes and the thing started up by itself.”

“That’s impossible.”

“No, Harry, we all saw it happen,” Iris piped up, crossing her arms at him. “Why would it do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t know that either, huh?” Cisco said with a humorless laugh. “Don’t you have the brain of the guy who was in charge of this whole operation?”

“Yes,” Harry said through clenched teeth, pushing away from the MRI machine to stalk closer to Cisco, “so if _I_ don’t know, then _he_ \-- I don’t know.”

His face twitched at that, something less than angry and maybe a little sad flitting across his face, which Cisco didn’t have the energy or inclination to parse --

“Fine,” he sighed, raising his hands in surrender and trying to let some of the tension seep out of his shoulders. Harry unclenched his fists. “Why don’t we just -- finish our checkups. And then Harry, you can show me how the rest of this ship works so I don’t break any other huge, inscrutable machines.”

“Okay, but what if, _before_ the inscrutable machines, we checked out some of those famous food reserves,” Barry suggested over the top of Caitlin’s head.

“Sure, babe,” Iris said, making laughing eye contact with Cisco in a way that almost let him believe they were going to be okay.

\---

_There was one person who might have known why the dark matter engine did what it did, and it wasn’t Harrison Wells. The original, not the hologram. But also not the -- whatever. You get it._

_See, Dr. Wells wasn’t the only head of the_ Providence _mission. He was the captain, the public face, but he didn’t build the ship or the engine. Wasn’t in the scientific trenches, if you will._

_No, the man who built it all was Wells’ partner, the chief research officer. He was the real genius, the real visionary, the leader of the underground lab where people learned how to bend dark matter to their will. This man did more to advance human knowledge than possibly anyone who had ever come before him, and he didn’t even care about getting the credit for it. He didn’t go on TV much, and he was happy to let Wells do the schmoozing at all those black-tie fundraisers. He just wanted to focus on the work. On the dark matter engine, and what it could do._

_But that man, Wells’ partner, this thinker of the highest degree -- despite all his shirking of the spotlight, those four kids would probably still recognize him if they saw him. Not only because he was the one counting down on Launch Day, and had cameras from every major news network on Earth trained on his face as he watched his life’s work obliterated in a flash of light. But also because he was in the news again a year later to the day, when he disappeared from his home, as if he had never been there, and was presumed dead._

_They would probably recognize his name, too. Clifford DeVoe._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for sticking with me through another chapter! Your lovely comments on the last one meant absolutely everything to me. Next part should be coming next weekend. In the meantime, join me on Tumblr at she-is-the-doctor for all gay nerd shit, all the time.


	3. I Do Enjoy Your Pestering

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's got all my favorite things - burgers, Jupiter, rising tension, and Cisco and Harry bickering in a lab. Hope you enjoy!

Harry brandished an arm half-heartedly at the plexiglass-sided cube in front of them. “ _Bon appetit._ ”

Barry squinted, mouth hanging open a little. “What is it, some kind of space microwave?”

“No, man, I remember the NOVA episode about these,” Cisco said over whatever scathing retort Harry was about to make. He stepped forward and leaned down to peer inside the printer. “No one wanted to spend seven years eating astronaut ice cream, so they built these to _Star-Trek-_ replicate any food their hearts desired.”

“All the ingredients are stored in shelf-stable powder form,” Harry said, “then rehydrated and extruded molecule by molecule.”

“‘Extruded’?” Iris repeated, biting her lip. “That doesn’t sound particularly --”

“Harry,” Cisco interrupted, “how do I make a cheeseburger?”

Harry hesitated a moment -- not exactly in his database-searching way, Cisco noted -- before replying. “Push the button and ask.”

Cisco pressed the green button on the side of the cube. “Burger, medium-rare, hot.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Harry look down at his feet, almost like he was trying not to laugh. But Cisco was quickly distracted from that development by the sight of a burger being built by the needle inside the printer chamber, line by line. 

“Wow. That looks,” Iris murmured, leaning down next to him, “ _just_ like a Big Belly Burger.”

Once they’d all loaded their arms with fast food and discontinued candy from their childhoods, the others scurried across the ballroom-sized mess hall to pick a table. Other than the food printers, the room looked basically like every other workplace cafeteria Cisco had ever been in -- gray walls, long tables, serviceable chairs. Cisco hung back to walk slowly next to Harry.

“Hey,” he said carefully, hoping he wasn’t about to insult him again, “do you have, like, hologram food you can eat?”

Harry looked down at him, eyebrows raised skeptically. “What possible purpose would that serve, Ramon?”

Cisco shrugged, which almost dislodged a Twix bar from his arms. “I don’t know, I just thought -- you probably have memories of food, right, and it must suck to not be able to taste it anymore.”

Harry blinked. “I’ve only been” -- he scowled, searching for a word -- “ _awake_ for a few hours. I’m not missing the baser pleasures of biological life just yet.”

Cisco didn’t quite believe him, not least because of the way Harry was stealing hungry glances at his junk food haul. But he let the subject go as they arrived at the table where the others were sitting, their faces already stuffed and greasy.

“I can’t believe I’m eating curly fries in space,” Caitlin said, tilting her head back to dangle a handful of said fries into her mouth like a bunch of grapes.

“Oh yeah, Harry, speaking of which,” Iris said around a mouthful of burger, “where are we right now? Like, in the solar system?”

“Um.” Harry frowned at the chair Cisco had just pulled out for him before giving his head a little shake and sitting down. “We should be passing Jupiter right now, actually. Which reminds me --”

And he waved his hand in the general direction of the wall, and the wall turned transparent.

“Holy _Hannah_ , Harry --” Cisco exclaimed, but his voice was lost in the awestruck cries of the others as they all dropped their food and leapt to their feet. The wall of the mess hall curved slightly with the outside of the ship, so it was like watching _Cosmos_ on an IMAX screen -- all-encompassing, overwhelming, mind-blowing. Cisco drew closer to it as he drank in the view, the stars shining steady against the pitch-dark of space. Had he ever seen true black before, undiluted by light? Had he ever seen the stars like they honestly were, without an atmosphere in the way? He didn’t think so, now that he was looking at them, now that he was _seeing_ , now --

and now there was _Jupiter_ , in the distance, sliding across their range of vision all too fast, far enough away that he could have blocked it out with the pad of his thumb, but still, wondrously _there_. The sun side of it swirled hazy orange and white against the night side, and Cisco could pick out a few moons, glittering tiny and precious around the planet.

“I could get used to this,” he whispered.

“We will,” Iris whispered back.

_Right._

Harry cleared his throat, snapping them all out of it. “Anyway,” he said, “we have about three hours before we breach the Oort Cloud and make the jump to sub-lightspeed, after which your bodies will need time to… adjust.”

“What do you mean?” Caitlin asked.

“Ever been motion-sick, Snow? It’s like that, but all the way down to your soul.”

Caitlin and Cisco shared a very apprehensive look, but Harry continued. “So if there’s anything you want to get done in that time, I would suggest you do it now.”

“That’s you and me, teach,” Cisco said, shooting fingerguns at Harry. “Inscrutable Machines 101.” Harry rolled his entire face along with his eyes.

“And the rest of us will go, what, check out the living quarters?” Iris said, glancing at Barry and Caitlin.

Barry nodded, practically feverish. “For clues!”

“Good luck with that, Allen. Let me know if you need me to clarify the difference between a thermal micrometeoroid suit and _space pajamas._ ” 

“Alright, Oscar the Grouch,” Cisco said, forgetting himself and reaching out to grab Harry’s arm. Harry’s image buzzed and he spun around and made an affronted noise, just in time to miss Barry sticking his tongue out at him behind his back. “Come give me the tour of your trash can, if you can’t play nice.”

\---

Cisco didn’t know what he’d been expecting Dr. Wells’ personal lab to look like, but it certainly wasn’t -- _this._ The space was huge, taking up almost a full level of the ship, Cisco guessed, and looked like a goddamn Hieronymous Bosch painting, that’s how cluttered and colorful and full of outlandish things it was. Bookcases covered every inch of wall that didn’t have a door built in, and workstations of every kind turned the lab floor into a maze of tables and stools and machines. Cisco saw a chemistry set, a carpenter’s bench, an easel, a table practically sagging under a mountain of circuit boards, some kind of Rube Goldberg setup he could only begin to imagine the purpose of -- and that was just in the immediate vicinity of the elevator.

“Damn, dude,” he said, picking up a circuit board the size of his face. “I've been told my bedroom is, and I quote, 'a hazard to all who dare enter,' but this --”

“Don’t touch that,” Harry growled, even though he had his back to Cisco and was picking his way deeper into the maze. “I get bored. Easily. Space gets very boring.”

Cisco sighed and balanced the circuit board back on the pile before following Harry past a sewing machine and a giant box of saws. “Not particularly comforting words, Captain.”

Harry huffed out a humorless laugh. “What makes you think I have any interest in comforting you?”

“I don’t know, man,” Cisco said, kicking a small rubber ball out of his way and under a table, “maybe the fact that I grew up watching you be cool and reassuring on TV?”

Harry stopped dead, and Cisco had to whirl his arms to avoid tripping through him. Harry turned to face him, suddenly very close, and it took a lot of willpower for Cisco not to take a step back and look like a wimp. He craned his neck up to meet Harry’s eyes; they were narrowed and blazing in a way that made it hard to believe he was just code and light, and not flesh and blood and simmering feeling.

“Let’s get one thing straight right now, Ramon,” Harry growled, his voice a dangerous register deeper. “I am not the man you grew up idolizing.”

Cisco swallowed. “Yeah, I know, because you’re a computer, I picked up on that --”

“No.” Harry stretched his fingers, clenched them, inhaled deeply through his nose. “Because that man never existed. He was a fiction, invented for the donors and the cameras. _I’m_ more real than he ever was.”

And Harry turned on his heel and kept walking. Cisco stayed where he was, half because it was all a lot to process and half to give Harry a taste of his own aggravating medicine. He watched Harry disappear behind a giant centrifuge. Then he heard him call out, his voice echoing around the cathedral of a lab.

“Come on, Ramon. You’ll never make it as the chief engineer with skin that thin.”

Cisco had to trap a laugh behind his hand. “Will, too,” he called back, and followed.

\---

_Jesus, watching those two interact is exhausting. And not just because it’s… strange. Given the circumstances._

_Anyway, tempting as it is to watch Ramon and the hologram bicker, remember that the other three are searching the passengers’ quarters. If they think they’ll find any sort of hint as to where everyone disappeared to, they are extremely stupid and wrong. But there is plenty to find in there. If they can manage to recognize it._

_The crew of_ Providence I _was unusual in a lot of ways, see, the most relevant to our purposes being that only twenty-five of them were, technically, crew. The other one hundred and seventy-eight were civilians -- highly vetted, highly skilled, and very highly trained civilians, of course. But they had no purpose on the ship except to survive the voyage, then figure out how to make farms and babies and societies on Proxima Centauri B._

_As such, the passengers were allowed to bring a lot of personal effects that would have been considered an unnecessary expense on any other spaceflight. A waste of fuel, some might have said. Useless crap, a certain captain might have called it, before his daughter reminded him that the laxer rules meant he could bring his circular saw, and every book he’d ever owned._

_Most of the passengers were young prodigies, precocious twenty-somethings with aspirations too grand for a single planet. Their belongings are interesting, in the anthropological sense: a cello here, a draft of a novel there. One day, not long from now, Ramon will tune up the cello and find it as good as new. West will sit down to read the manuscript, and it will be so terrible that she’ll laugh herself to tears. Things outlast people. That’s always been the way of it._

_Some of the passengers, unfortunately, didn’t have much going for them besides being rich enough to buy a seat on the ship. Their things aren’t worth looking at._

_A few of the passengers were family units. Here’s where West and Snow and Allen will have a bit more trouble, emotionally speaking. There are photo albums. Baby blankets and very small shoes. A stuffed gorilla with one eye missing, and a calculus textbook with notes scribbled in the margins._

_Those last two are from the same bunk, actually. The three of them are searching it now. In a moment, Allen will find a name on the inside cover of the textbook: Jesse Wells._

\---

Harry had stopped in front of a well-loved whiteboard. Cisco watched as he reached, seemingly without thinking, for the marker sitting on the bottom of it, and of course his hand phased through. The little frustrated sound he made in the back of his throat made Cisco take pity on him all over again.

“What do you need the marker for, Harry? Maybe I can help.”

Harry shoved his hands into his pockets. “It’s not,” he stammered, “it’s just -- I was going to explain. The dark matter engine. And writing things out always -- but it doesn’t --”

“What if I take the marker and you tell me what to write?”

Harry’s face pinched. “That’s stupid.”

“I’m doing it.” Cisco grabbed the marker, uncapped it, and grinned at Harry, standing at the ready. Harry squinted at him, again in that not-angry way that made him look like he either wanted to smile or solve Cisco like a Rubik’s cube.

“Fine,” he grumbled. “Sketch two neighboring star systems.”

“I think I could manage better than a _sketch_ ,” Cisco said. The marker squeaked as he drew.

“Big words for a man who just gave the sun a smiley face.”

“See, that’s my uncommon artistic vision coming through. You’re squashing my genius.”

“Mm-hm.” Harry leaned over Cisco’s shoulder and traced his finger between two of Cisco’s polka-dot planets. “Now connect the stars, and their planets, and make it so the lines join together in the space between systems. Like strands of a frayed rope, coming together.”

Cisco followed Harry's finger with the marker, then stood back. Two solar systems, joined together by a thick line that branched at either end to capture each celestial object. “It’s the dark matter web,” he said, realizing. “The filaments that connect galaxies, and stars, and everything.”

“Exactly, Ramon.” Harry’s hand did a funny thing, almost like he meant to touch Cisco on the shoulder, but then he thrust it back in his pocket. “The dark matter engine _rides_ the filaments. Latches onto one, lets the axions flow through the reactor, and pumps massive amounts of energy out the other end.”

“So the vortex I saw in the middle of the engine ring --”

“-- is the core of the dark matter filament, yes.” Harry leaned across Cisco again to point at one of the smaller strands emerging from a planet. “Right now, we’re here, riding the filament that connects Earth to the larger pathway between our sun and the Proxima Centauri system.” He traced along the line to where it joined the others. “Soon, we’ll reach the dark matter superhighway, if you will, and then it’s off to the races.” 

Cisco tapped the marker against his mouth. “So you guys tested the engine. Like, a lot.”

“No, we threw it together in my garage over President’s Day weekend. Yes, we tested it a lot.”

“And it worked when you tested it. And it’s working now.”

Harry frowned, like he was just on the cusp of catching Cisco’s drift. “That’s right.”

“So on Launch Day,” Cisco said, starting to pace, waving the marker in absentminded loops as he went, “when the engine decided _not_ to work and instead _Leftovers-_ ed two hundred people out of existence --”

“Two hundred and three.”

“-- yes, sorry, two hundred and three.” Cisco stopped, turned, pointed the marker at Harry with a flourish. “What was different? What was the confounding variable?”

Harry ran a hand over his hair, his eyes flicking back and forth. “I’m trying to think.”

“Was the engine tampered with?”

“No, all the pre-launch diagnostics came out clean.”

“Could your team have made some kind of error?”

Harry crossed his arms. “Don’t insult me, Ramon.”

Cisco flung his arms up in exasperation. “Alright, I don’t know, did anything weird happen at the test right before Launch Day?”

Harry gasped. He froze, staring unfocused at some point over Cisco’s head, his eyes buzzing fast enough that they became a bright blue blur. And then he exhaled, and looked at Cisco. “There was no test before Launch Day.”

Cisco dropped the marker. “ _What?_ ”

Harry ran both hands through his hair this time, teasing it into a stress pouf. “I just remembered. DeVoe, the chief researcher, he… he stopped testing the engine a couple months before the launch. He said it had -- what was it -- ‘done what it needed to do.’”

Cisco dragged his palms down his cheeks, thinking hard. “Why,” he said slowly, “did you only just remember this?”

Harry whirled on him, temper flaring again. “That’s what you’re fixating on? Why not DeVoe --”

“No, yeah, he’s definitely sounding sketchy, but listen.” Cisco marched back to the board and smacked it, right between the star systems. “You remember all of this. You remember your whole life. You’re a _perfect replica_ of Dr. Wells’ mind right up to Launch Day. So if you didn’t remember DeVoe stopping the tests…” Cisco clenched his fist around an idea and pounded the whiteboard triumphantly. “Harry, this might be a little forward of me, but I’m going to need to look at your code.”

Harry frowned again, but this time it was tinged with something like fear. “Why?” he asked, his voice rasping and smaller than Cisco had ever heard it.

“Because I think Wells might have hidden some of your memories from you,” Cisco said, jabbing a finger at the air right in front of Harry’s forehead. “But clearly you’re meant to find them, because we just did.”

\---

_They find a lot in Jesse’s bunk. A well-worn copy of_ Pride and Prejudice. _A tiny drone she’d been building from scratch, despite the fact that she absolutely would not have been allowed to fly it on the ship, no matter how nicely she asked her father. A toy telescope that would have been useless in deep space._

_(It was the last birthday gift her mother had given her. But West and Snow and Allen have no way of knowing that.)_

_All that, and Snow gets distracted by one of Jesse’s uniforms. Outwardly, it looks just like every other one they’ve seen; all the passengers had a few sets of the crisp gray-blue jacket and pants, and the ones they hadn’t been wearing when they disappeared in a flash of light were mostly folded neatly on the shelves at the base of their bunks. Jesse was no different. Except that maybe hers were folded a little bit neater._

_But Snow notices something, a cuff on a jacket that’s not quite lying the way it should. She picks it up, turns the sleeve inside out, gasps and runs after West and Allen, who are already walking away in search of the next imprint of someone’s life. And Snow shows them what’s in the sleeve, a tiny metallic circle of what looks like velcro, and when they don’t immediately understand what it is, she tells them:_

_It’s a medication patch, she says. I think someone was trying to inject Jesse with something without her consent, she says. I don’t know if we can trust Wells, she says._

_(They can. But, granted, they have no way of knowing that.)_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading, and thank you for your continuing effort to make my heart explode from reading your nice comments. I'll be writing quite a bit over the Thanksgiving weekend, so the next chapter should be up soon!


	4. Honey, It's the Mileage

Cisco was elbow-deep in Harry’s source code, so to speak, trying to ignore the man himself pacing behind him and gnawing loudly on his glasses, when the elevator _dinged_ and a voice rang out across the lab.

“ _Harry!_ ” 

Cisco turned away from the wall monitor where he’d been interfacing with the ship’s computer to see Caitlin shoving her way through the chaos, Barry and Iris close behind her. She had a blue jacket in her hand, for some reason, and was waving it in Harry’s shocked face before Cisco could form any thought besides _Caitlin’s angry, and that means there’s been a war crime_.

“Why would you do this?” she snarled, brandishing the sleeve of the jacket under Harry’s nose.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Snow, I --”

“ _This!_ ” Caitlin fumbled the sleeve inside out, and Cisco saw something flash silvery and rough. “A patch, Harry, on the inside of your daughter’s uniform, where she wouldn’t notice it. What were you thinking? What kind of person tries to inject something into their kid without their knowledge?”

And Cisco knew that Caitlin and Harry couldn’t hurt each other if they tried, but the ready-to-pounce bent of their bodies had him rushing into the space between them anyway, holding a hand out in front of each to keep their furies from colliding.

“ _Fuck you,_ ” Harry hissed at Caitlin over his head, and Cisco flinched at the directness, after all the snark and teasing. “Fuck you for even _suggesting_ \--”

“Hey!” Iris said, coming to Cisco’s aid by taking Caitlin’s wrist and pulling her gently away. “You don’t get to talk to her like that. Do you know what the patch is doing in Jesse’s jacket or not?”

Harry ran a hand over his mouth and exhaled a shaking breath through his fingers. “No,” he said, his voice harsh and final even as he glanced, unsure, at Cisco.

“But,” Cisco said, looking back and forth between Harry and Caitlin before tentatively lowering his arms, “we might be able to find out.”

“Find out how?” Barry said from behind Iris. He looked paler than usual, Cisco thought with a fraction of his brain, in the dusty-gold light of the lab.

“Harry and I discovered that he has some memories he can’t access, because Dr. Wells didn’t want him to.” Cisco hopped back over to the computer to indicate a certain section of code. “See, there are blocks in Harry’s programming that don’t match up. Sections that look like they should lead into something, but they don’t, and then the next block is something else entirely. One brain cell is firing, but there’s nothing to pick it up.”

Caitlin glared back at Harry. “Why would Wells hide his memories --”

“-- if he didn’t have something to hide? That’s what I would think, too, if the memories were just erased and unreachable.” Cisco scrolled furiously, jabbed his finger at the screen again. “But _here._ Here’s where Harry was able to recall an encrypted memory earlier. The code is rewriting itself, forming new connections as we speak. The synapses are gettin’ all cozy with each other again. Which means that Wells wasn’t trying to burn any evidence --”

“He was was leaving a trail of breadcrumbs,” Iris finished, and stepped forward to peer over Cisco’s shoulder. “How did Harry remember? Can he do it again?”

“Ramon did it.” Cisco twisted his neck around so fast he got hair in his eyes. Harry became very interested in his feet as soon as Cisco’s gaze slid onto him. “Talking to him did, I mean. His questions, the dialectic, that’s what reformed the connections.”

Cisco brushed his hair back and couldn’t help grinning at what he had to assume was Harry being bitter. “Oh my God, it was,” he said, stepping away from the monitor. “Does that _kill_ you, Harry, that you needed help?”

Harry looked at him then, his sardonic scowl back in place. “I think we both know I can’t be killed.”

Cisco crinkled his nose in Harry’s face, then turned back to Iris, who for some reason was looking at him the way she had the time she’d caught him drinking iced coffee through a Twizzler. Like he was doing something unfathomably stupid, and she wasn’t surprised in the slightest. “Hey, Joy Reid,” he said, which snapped her out of it at least, “ask the guy some hard-hitting questions.”

Iris nodded through her coalescing journalist thoughts. “Was Jesse sick?”

Harry tapped his toes impatiently. They didn’t make any sound on the floor. “No,” he huffed.

“Was she on some medication you didn’t want the rest of the ship to know about?” Barry asked. He was sweating, weirdly enough. Clammy-looking. Cisco wondered if he was already motion-sick, even before the sub-lightspeed jump. 

“No, Allen,” Harry said. “I don’t --”

“Were you doing an unethical experiment on your own daughter?” Caitlin spat, the jacket crumpled in her crossed arms.

“ _No_ ,” Harry said through gritted teeth. “And this isn’t working. We’re not getting anywhere. Doesn’t feel. Right. Like before.”

His eyes skittered to Cisco for a split second, but it was enough. “No _way_ ,” Cisco said around a disbelieving laugh. “It only works with me?”

Harry chose the ceiling to stare at this time. “It’s probably just because you were the first to access one of the memories. The neural pathways latched onto your nagging.”

“Hold on, there’s a joke to be made about ‘never forgetting’ and ‘your first,’ gimme a sec --” 

“Shut up.” Astonishingly, Harry’s face was flushing pink. With rage, for sure. “Just ask me a question, Ramon.”

Cisco took full advantage of the opportunity to pace regally in front of Harry, hands clasped behind his back for full effect. “Let’s try again, then. Were you treating Jesse for anything?”

“No.” Harry relaxed a little, let his gaze drop back to Cisco.

“Were you testing something on her?”

“Absolutely not _._ ”

“Were you…” Cisco’s eyes landed on Barry, who still looked queasy. “Were you expecting her to have some kind of adverse reaction to the spaceflight?”

“Adverse reaction.” Harry’s hand flew to his temple, long fingers pressing into his skin like he could dig the answer out. “Not to the spaceflight, no. But --”

And then he froze.

“Brace yourselves.”

And then the fabric of space _bent_ around them.

Cisco felt it heavy in his cells, the acceleration to some horrible, impossible speed. He was a car speeding off a cliff, a plane getting swept up in a hurricane, a bad guy getting his skin peeled away by the Arc of the Covenant. 

Motion. Sick. All the way down to his soul, like Harry had said.

Nothing in the lab moved around him, but Cisco stumbled like he’d been punched in the throat. He grabbed his knees, tried to remember how to think. He was underwater, entire galaxies of stars sparking at his peripheral vision. He was only mostly sure his guts hadn’t been blown out of him between his shoulder blades.

_“Breathe through it, Ramon,”_ he heard, as if from a universe away. He blinked, trying to get the lightspeed fuzz out from the space between his ears. There was a pair of glasses, he thought, possibly attached to a worried face and a body in a black sweater, crouching in front of him --

_“Barry!”_

Iris’ scream cut razor-edged through the fog. Cisco turned away from Harry and managed to focus his eyes, at last, on the limp splay of limbs on the floor that was supposed to be his tall, unwavering friend.

“Med bay. Now.” Cisco reached with all his scrambled molecules for Harry’s voice, and he remembered how to move.

\---

_So Ramon is the one. The key, that is. That’s. Interesting. Not entirely unexpected, but interesting._

_Okay, maybe a little unexpected. Whatever._

_Anyway, the thing about dark matter is that nobody really knows anything about it. There’s a lot of it, we know that. Nothing else would exist without it, that too. It formed the framework that the first stars built themselves on; it keeps galaxies spinning long after they should have stopped. That’s the most we can say with any degree of certainty._

_Even the_ Providence _scientists -- you know, the ones who staked two hundred and three lives and the trajectory of human civilization on their applied knowledge of dark matter -- couldn’t have said for sure how the engine worked. They invented it the way Alexander Fleming invented penicillin, or Ruth Wakefield invented the chocolate chip cookie: accidentally, and by making a series of mistakes that should have, by all rights, ruined everything. Some of those engineers were such morons, there’s no way they earned their PhDs. They had to have sold their kidneys for them._

_But that’s not the point._

_The point is that, instead of ruining everything, the scientists stumbled into a replicable reaction. Dark matter in, face-melting amounts of energy out. They ran all their tests, and the engine worked the same every time. They didn’t need to know why it happened, they thought, to trust that it would. Good enough._

_But the thing about trusting in something you don’t fully understand is that you can’t. Not when it comes to science, not when it comes to people’s lives, and not when it comes to the darker parts of the universe. DeVoe understood this, for better or worse. So he started running his own experiments, in secret, to answer all the countless questions he still had. What really happened as the dark matter flowed through the engine? Where was all that energy coming from? What would happen (and this was why he had to run his tests in secret) if that energy came in contact with a human body?_

_DeVoe got some answers, because the universe doesn’t give a shit about us and sometimes bad people get what they want. First, he learned that the energy was coming from_ somewhere _. And second, he found out that this somewhere -- well, it saw what the human body was going for, but it had a few changes to make to the design._

_That was when DeVoe stopped testing the engine, or told Wells and everyone else he did, anyway. It had done what it needed to do, he said._

_(Yeah, jackass, that’s one way of putting it. If only you’d had any idea.)_

_So. Let’s recap what we know so far. In more or less chronological order, so the whole class can follow along:_

_\- Two months before launch, DeVoe tells Wells that he's stopped testing the dark matter engine._

_\- Wells spends those two months uploading everything he knows into a hologram that can remember what DeVoe did, but only with the help of someone smart and kind, maybe with nice hair and a high tolerance for Wells’ bullshit._

_\- Just before the launch, Wells hides a medication patch in his daughter’s uniform._

_\- Launch Day is Launch Day. You don’t need it spelled out for you again._

_\- Twenty years later, Ramon touches the engine and a wave of energy knocks him and his friends off their feet._

_\- Now, Allen is comatose._

_Have you figured it out yet? Shout it out, when you do._

\---

Barry’s feet stuck out over the edge of the hospital bed. That’s what Cisco’s speed-addled brain chose to focus on, _had_ to focus on, because the alternative was looking at Barry’s slack, washed-out face and that just wasn’t an option.

_Even in space the beds aren’t big enough for you, bud_ , he thought fuzzily. He let Iris squeeze the blood out of his arm as they watched Caitlin fumble with a syringe of epinephrine.

Harry was still there, hovering. “What can I do, Snow?” he said, crackling tense with his desperation not to be useless.

“The bed’s scanning his vitals, right?” Caitlin’s voice was doctor-crisp even though her movements were still sluggish. Harry nodded. “Read them off to me.”

Harry strode to Barry’s side. His eyes flicked through whatever it was they could see. “Body temp is one-eighteen, pulse is one-ninety, blood pressure is two-forty over one-eighty-five --”

“That’s not possible,” Caitlin snapped. “He would be dead, of hyperthermia and catastrophic heart failure.”

“Well he’s not.”

“Check again.”

“The numbers are in my goddamn _head_ , Snow, what more do you want?”

Cisco swayed on his feet as his vision went misty. His head pounded with every heartbeat, and his nose felt oddly stuffy. Iris’ steel-boned grip on his bicep was the only thing he could feel with any clarity. 

Caitlin finally managed to get the needle into Barry’s arm, then put a trembling hand on his forehead. “God, he _is_ burning up,” she murmured. “Are the numbers going down, at least?”

“No,” Harry said. “They’re going up.”

“ _What?_ ”

“You heard me. Do you want an EEG? The bed does that too.”

“Yes, please. Where’s the defibrillator? If his heart stops --”

“Snow.”

Harry’s voice was suddenly quiet, full of alarm and awe. Caitlin turned away from the equipment cabinet she had been rummaging through and froze. Cisco realized he was going to have to look away from the spot on the wall he’d been fixating on and look at Barry, little though he wanted to. It took him a long moment.

When he managed it, he thought his vision had gone fuzzy again. Except _no_ , everything around Barry was still in focus. It was just his friend’s unconscious body that was vibrating too fast to see clearly.

What.

Iris dropped Cisco’s arm. Pins and needles rushed in to the place where her hand had been. She ran to Barry, Caitlin shuffling aside to give her space, and tried to touch her boyfriend’s hand. She hissed when the air around him sizzled at her fingers.

And then Barry sat up, with a rattling gasp. He lifted his vibrating hands to stare at them. His mouth stayed open in a silent scream.

“Barry --” Iris cried, reaching out to him.

And then there was a blazing crash of lightning, and Barry was across the room.

What.

Barry collapsed against a wall, gulping for breath. His eyes, bloodshot and petrified like a caged animal’s, skidded from Iris to Cisco to something in the middle distance.

“Barry.” Iris stepped forward, shivering almost as badly as her boyfriend.

“Iris,” Barry gasped, every word looking like it had to be ripped out of him. “Don’t -- you shouldn’t --”

And then there was another flash, and Barry was gone.

Caitlin stumbled into Cisco, looking around frantically and babbling something that Cisco couldn’t quite make out over the cotton in his brain. She was still woozy like him, and scared. Cisco didn’t want Caitlin to be scared. He was scared enough for both of them. He reached a hand out to anchor himself to her shoulder, and --

_wha-a-a-a-at_ \--

Everything went black, and then blacker than black, and then Cisco was somewhere else. Somewhere wavering and bluish and slow, where time felt different or maybe didn’t matter at all. A room he’d never been in, with snow ( _snow?_ ) drifting languidly between its walls. But there, right where she’d been, her shoulder cold ( _cold?_ ) under his fingers, was Caitlin.

Except Caitlin’s eyes were brown. This one’s were ice-gray, and angry.

Cisco gasped and fell backward, right on his ass. The world was right again, fluorescent white instead of honey-thick blue, but nothing felt okay. His body ached like it had been ripped apart and put back together proton by proton. He was pretty sure his nose was bleeding, but he didn’t have the energy to wipe it away. It was all he could do to heave himself up onto one elbow and swallow the bile threatening to rise up his throat --

and then Iris was screaming again. So was Caitlin. 

And Cisco squinted through his hair to see Caitlin on all fours, quivering elbows barely supporting her as she watched the floor around her hands turn to ice.

Cisco tried to will himself back to wherever real life was. Because no way this was it.

And then Harry was crouching over him, his breathing heavy and his eyes blown wide.

“What happened, Ramon?” His voice was hoarser than ever.

Cisco blinked. He watched distractedly as Iris shook the frost off her shoe and began help Caitlin pull her hands out of the ice. “I saw something,” he said around his leaden tongue.

“Saw what?”

“Um.” Cisco squeezed his eyes shut. He was sure he was imagining the sound of photons humming around Harry’s body, the miniscule waves of energy coming off of him. “Caitlin. With different eyes. And it was snowing, indoors.”

Harry’s fingers twitched, like he was dying to write it all down, make the connections, solve the equation. “And it wasn’t here.”

Cisco shook his head. Swallowed. “Or now.”

“Say it.” Cisco opened his eyes to see Harry's blue ones sweeping over his face, searching. “Ask me, so I can remember.”

Cisco finally sat all the way up. Squared his shoulders so his voice wouldn't come out as small as he felt. 

“Why did I just see the future?” he asked.

It worked. Harry gasped. His irises went blurry, then still.

“The dark matter engine,” he whispered. “This is what it does to people. Gives them… abilities.” Harry fell back on his heels, gripping his hair with a white-knuckled hand like he could get his skull out of his head if he pulled hard enough. “DeVoe knew. And so did I.”

\---

_Well, they figured it out. I wish there could have been a better way._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's right, superpowers in space! Consider this your heads up that their powers aren't always going to work exactly like they do in the show. 
> 
> Hope you enjoyed reading! A million, billion thanks to those of you who keep leaving comments on every chapter. You're the real heroes. Stay tuned for more soon!


	5. Those Terrible Cosmic Rays

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you all so much for all your incredible comments on the last chapter!! I'm amazed that this weird idea of mine has gotten so many of you as excited about it as I am. This chapter strikes a bit of a different tone, as everyone settles and reacts to the events of the previous chapter. Hope it still satisfies.

Cisco didn’t sleep, that first night. (Not that there was such a thing as night, in deep space. But the ship’s lights had gone from white to gold to deep orange, to trigger the passengers’ circadian rhythms. They really had thought of nearly everything.) 

Every time he let himself drift off, Cisco was plunged into half-waking dreams about a life that wasn’t his. The same woman was in all of them, some white lady with brown hair he didn’t know. He saw her in a graduation gown, in a lab coat, in a dirty dress with pockets. He watched as she argued with her sister over the best arrangement of their Thomas the Tank Engine tracks, as she laughed with her friends under the twinkling lights of a rooftop bar -- all of it that same, viscous blue, none of it anything he was supposed to be seeing. And every time he came back to himself his headache deepened, and his skin felt closer to vibrating off his body.

So Cisco held his eyes open until they felt dry and tacky, kept himself awake by pinching at his elbows and tugging at his hair. At one point, hours into the artificial night, he fumbled through the bunk’s shelves to find one of her uniforms. _Eliza Harmon_ , the name tag said. That was her name, and Cisco was in her bunk, and she was gone.

\---

_Alright, let’s slow down and try to figure this out._

_Now, I may be able to see what happened, what’s happening, in some cases what might happen. But that doesn’t mean I can see inside their heads. It doesn’t mean I have a goddamn clue why Ramon is doing this._

_Why isn’t he in the med bay with the others? Snow is there, to monitor herself. Allen is there, hooked up to a glucose drip because it didn’t take them long to find him passed out in the bio lab from hypoglycemia induced by his heightened metabolism. And West is there, obviously, to watch over Allen. I’m sure she’d watch over Ramon, too, if he asked._

\---

When Cisco came into the med bay the next morning balancing four mugs of replicator coffee in his arms like a true food service veteran, he was almost relieved to see that the others all looked about as wrecked as he felt. 

“Morning, Cisco,” Iris yawned as she accepted her mug like it was the Holy Grail. She took Barry’s, too, and put it on his bedside table. “Did you sleep okay? You look --”

“Slept fine,” Cisco said, turning away so Iris wouldn’t see the lie in his baggy, bloodshot eyes. “The bunks are comfy enough, so if we all wanna move in there once we --”

“-- stop being genetically modified dark matter freaks?” Caitlin’s voice was rough and bitter in a way Cisco had never heard before, though she still accepted her coffee from him with a tiny smile and leaned back against her bed’s headboard to breathe in the steam. “I don’t think that’s gonna happen, Cisco.”

“That’s not what…” Cisco swallowed and blinked back the prickly feeling in his aching eyes. “I was going to say, once we’re all feeling better. Whatever that ends up looking like.”

Caitlin just looked at him for a long moment before dropping her gaze back to her coffee. Her eyes were still brown, at least. Cisco wondered how long he would have to wait for them to turn pale and evil.

There was a loud, gargling groan from behind him, and Cisco whipped around to see Barry stirring, stretching his arms over his head before wincing and putting them back down.

Iris put her coffee down so fast it spilled a little and ran a soothing hand over Barry’s hair. “Hey, baby, hey. Hey. How are you feeling?”

Barry smiled up at her, like he had forgotten all the pain and panic the second she touched him. “Like I just ran a marathon? And then another marathon, walking on my hands.”

“Well, the soreness makes sense given the extreme strain on your muscles,” Caitlin called from her bed. “But you’re also probably nowhere near as sore as you should be. The lactic acid in your system is getting reabsorbed, like, impossibly fast.” She hid a sullen grimace behind her mug, Cisco noticed. “So you’ve got super speed and super healing.”

Barry’s mouth dangled open as he looked frantically between all of them. “Why is this -- are you guys --”

“Right, dude, you missed it when you peaced out last night,” Cisco said, moving to stand next to Iris at Barry’s bedside, “but apparently the energy from the dark matter engine Fantastic Four-ed us. I kind of, uh, saw the future, and --”

“And I can freeze stuff,” Caitlin said. “But not on purpose, of course, just by accident. Which is, you know, a super cool power to have on a climate-controlled ship traveling through the vacuum of space.”

Barry sat up a little, propped on his elbows, so he could see Caitlin over Iris’ shoulder. “That’s, um. I’m sure you’ll figure it out, Caitlin.” Caitlin shrugged. Barry turned, frowning, to Iris. “Honey, have you --”

Iris shook her head, smiling. “Nope. Nothing. So it’s more like the Fantastic Three.”

“Hey now.” Cisco put a hand on her shoulder. “A, there aren’t really any synonyms for ‘fantastic’ that start with a ‘th,’ so our hands are tied when it comes to the name. And, B, don’t think you’re getting out of being a Super Friend so easy. You’re still the team leader.”

Iris put her hand over his. “Thank you, Cisco. But, and I mean this in the most loving, supportive way possible, I am _totally good_ not having any of this dark matter nonsense to deal with.”

Cisco snorted. “Wow, alright, I see how it is.” Iris smiled at him, but in that way that made it clear she knew his jokes were covering something up.

“So that medication patch,” Barry wondered aloud, saving Cisco from a patented Iris Interrogation, “did Wells put something in it to protect Jesse from, you know, _this?_ ”

“Yeah, that’s what Harry remembered last night. There was a serum in it that was supposed to protect her DNA from getting rewritten.” Cisco only sort of registered Caitlin looking up at him in interest before he jumped guiltily. “Oh, shit, I forgot -- Harry?”

 _Pop._ Harry appeared at the foot of Barry’s bed, apparently halfway through cleaning his glasses with the hem of his sweater. He looked up at Cisco in an almost startled way, then gave him a quick once-over like he was checking that all of his parts were still in place.

“Hi?” Cisco said it like a question, mainly out of surprise that Harry still hadn’t said anything rude.

“Hi.” Harry put his glasses back on and glanced at Barry and Caitlin. “You’re all. Conscious.”

“Yeah, sorry for not waking you sooner.”

“It’s okay, Ramon.” Harry squinted at Cisco. “You look tired.”

Cisco’s anger flared along with his headache. “You’re not exactly a picture of effortless, ethereal beauty yourself.”

Harry’s mouth twisted. “That’s not -- whatever. Do you need something?”

“Um.” It took Cisco a moment to remember that Harry was, technically, a computer designed to complete tasks on command. “No. I mean, not like that. We were just talking about, you know, recent developments, and I thought you might want to be included. But if looking at my hideous face is just too much of a struggle for you --”

Iris made an odd, strangled coughing sound, but when Cisco looked at her she was busy fluffing Barry’s pillow.

“I _was_ running some simulations overnight,” Harry said, shooting one last glare at Cisco before striding over to Caitlin to interface with her bed, “and I think I know how your powers work.”

“Oh, do tell,” Caitlin grumbled. 

Harry, busily scanning through the data the bed fed him, didn’t register the sarcasm. “Dark matter, you need to understand, is slippery. It acts like it’s part of our universe, but only sometimes, and only in certain situations, and other times it’s like it’s not here at all. The prevailing theory among physicists is that dark matter exists both in our universe and somewhere _else_ , some other, parallel dimension.” Harry looked at Cisco questioningly. “At least, that was the prevailing theory twenty years ago.”

Cisco rubbed at his throbbing temples. “Sure. Sounds like what I vaguely remember from the one physical cosmology class I took in undergrad.”

Harry frowned again, but continued. “Alright. So. I believe, based on my own calculations and the memories I managed to retrieve about DeVoe’s experiments, that the energy that affected you comes from this other place, and your abilities are rooted in your connection to it.” He pointed at Caitlin. “Snow. To make things cold, you have to take energy out of them. But energy can’t just disappear, so if nothing around you is getting correspondingly warmer --”

“-- I must be diverting the energy out of our dimension and into the other one.” The realization didn’t seem to make Caitlin feel any better, though, and she slurped glumly at the dregs of her coffee. Cisco would have given her a hug if he wasn’t so terrified of getting thrown into another vision of her future.

“Allen,” Harry said, moving to stand between Iris and Cisco at Barry’s bedside, “you’re not doing anything new, you’re just doing everything _faster_. Which makes me think that spacetime is flowing differently around you -- that it’s following the rules of another dimension.”

“Cool.” Barry grinned, ever the optimist, and Iris took his hand in hers.

And then Harry turned to Cisco. Cisco involuntarily crossed his arms, which probably made him look exactly as nervous and defensive as he felt. Harry didn’t back away. “Ramon.”

“Give it to me straight, doc.”

“I haven’t figured you out yet. I mean, your powers. Why you --”

“-- see things.”

Harry inclined his head curiously. “See the _future_.”

 _Fuck._ “That’s what I said.”

Harry narrowed his eyes. Then he walked past Cisco and away toward the elevator.

“Um, excuse you,” Cisco called at his back.

“Come to the lab, Ramon.” Cisco heard the elevator approach with a whoosh; Harry must have called it with his computer-mind. “I need to teach you about. The thrusters.”

“It can’t wait? I thought we were on autopilot, why do I have to --”

“ _Now_ , Ramon.”

Cisco turned to Iris, ready to watch her put Harry in his place, but she was too busy sharing some kind of _look_ with Caitlin. When she finally met Cisco’s eyes, she just sipped innocently at her coffee.

“You should go, Cisco,” she said into her mug. “Sounds important.”

Cisco threw his hands up and followed Harry. _Talk about inscrutable_.

\---

_Why would he talk to the hologram, if he won’t even talk to his best friends? That would be stupid. He’s being stupid._

\---

Cisco stomped out of the elevator and down one of the aisles of garbage as soon as the door opened onto Harry’s lab. “Alright, what’s _so_ important with the thrusters that it couldn’t even wait until the caffeine absorbed into my nervous system?”

 _Pop_ , and Harry was in front of him, instead of behind him. Cisco yelped.

“Why are you lying to your friends, Ramon?”

“ _Jesus_ , dude, don’t _do_ that --”

“Answer the question.”

Cisco rubbed at his chest, tried to get his breathing back to something like a steady rhythm. “I’m not lying to anybody.”

Harry loomed closer. Cisco hadn’t imagined it before -- he _could_ kind of hear the waving of the light Harry was made of, if he listened for it. Listening for it made his head hurt even worse, though, so he tried not to.

“You’re _omitting_ something, then,” Harry growled. “You had another vision last night, and you’re trying to hide it.”

“God, fine, I -- I saw Eliza Harmon, okay?”

Harry took a step back. “The biochem researcher? She was on the crew.”

“Yeah, I figured.” Cisco felt tears threatening again, and looked around for something to distract himself. “I slept in her bed.”

“And you saw her past, like you saw Snow’s future.” Cisco nodded, and Harry ran a hand over his jaw. “Is that why you didn’t sleep? The visions kept you up?”

“Ding ding ding.” Cisco picked up what looked like an RC controller from the nearest table. He pressed down on one of the toggles and, somewhere in the depths of the lab, a tiny engine whirred to life.

Harry, instead of telling him to stop touching the controller, just sighed. “And you didn’t tell Snow or West this, why?”

Cisco heard whatever he was controlling bump against a table somewhere. He backed it up and kept driving. “Does it matter?”

“Don’t pull that crap with me.”

Cisco looked up, startled again by Harry’s directness, and he heard the vehicle crash again in the distance. “What crap?” he shot back.

“That ‘I think my feelings are a burden so I’m just never going to talk about them, even to the people who care about me, until they go away or I die of emotional constipation’ _crap_.” 

Cisco wanted to yell at Harry. Wanted to scream and tell him how wrong he was and poke him threateningly in the chest. But Harry had no chest to poke threateningly, and he was entirely, infuriatingly right, so Cisco just raised the controller and hit the throttle again. 

“That was weirdly specific,” he eventually mumbled.

“Yes, well.” Harry shoved his glasses back up his nose. “It’s easy to recognize your own bullshit in other people.”

“Wow, you? Emotionally constipated? Inconceivable.”

“It took a lot of work to get this in touch with my emotions, Ramon.”

“Right, all two of them. ‘Grumpy’ and ‘still grumpy, but bothering Cisco made it a little better.’”

Harry snorted, and didn’t deny it. He was quiet for a moment, listening to the mechanical buzzing of the RC as Cisco bumped it into some other work station. Cisco shuffled to his left, closer to Harry, trying to see down one of the aisles.

“Where -- is it --” he muttered.

“Use your powers to find out.”

It was such an out-of-nowhere suggestion that Cisco couldn’t help but laugh in Harry’s face. “ _Use_ them? If anything, they use me.”

“But maybe if you learn to summon your visions deliberately, they won’t keep seizing you involuntarily.”

Cisco frowned up at Harry skeptically. The man looked upsettingly earnest. “So you want me to, what. Try and vibe the car from the controller?”

“Vibe, resonate, hold a seance, whatever.”

“I’m calling it vibing, weirdo.” Cisco ran the pads of his thumbs over the toggles and closed his eyes. Reluctantly, he let himself _listen_ again, for Harry’s pulsing photons and the trembling atoms of the ship under his feet and _there_ ,the electrons flowing through the wires under his fingers. It was all so much, too much, it hurt his head and his hands and the molecules under his skin --

Cisco let go of the breath he’d been holding and opened his eyes. Harry was staring at him. The intensity of it made Cisco’s toes curl. “I can’t, Harry.”

“Why not?”

“It’s just that...” _I don’t want this? I didn’t ask for any of this? Thirty-six hours ago the only things I had to worry about were paying rent and whether my thesis advisor hated me for sending her emails at 3 A.M.?_

Cisco swallowed. “It hurts. Listening to all the frequencies is like, sensory overload.”

“Wait.” Harry’s forehead wrinkled and his eyes got wider, brighter. “You can feel --”

“-- the particles in everything vibrating, yeah.” Cisco put down the controller and scrubbed at his eyes. “Makes my skin crawl.”

Harry reached toward Cisco, almost like he wanted to take him by the hand, but just ended up making a flappy _come on_ motion. “Follow me, Ramon. Bring the controller.”

Cisco plodded mutely after Harry through the winding streets of his junk city. What Harry was looking for, he couldn’t possibly imagine. A couple times, Harry paused to look down at the floor, then up at the ceiling, like he was trying to align himself with something Cisco couldn’t see. 

“Here.” Harry stopped for real, deep in the middle of the lab. He turned and held his hands an inch away from Cisco’s shoulders, like he wanted to scoot him into place. Cisco shuffled his feet obligingly. “There -- there. Stay right there.”

“Care to invite me into your mind palace, Harry?”

“You’re standing directly above the dark matter engine.” Harry ran a hand through his hair, making it stand up every which way again. For real, it was like the man couldn’t do science until his hair was well and truly floofed. “Meaning you should be optimally aligned with the flow of the dark matter filament we’re riding. And if I’m right, which I probably am, you’ll be able to use it to focus your vibing.”

Cisco’s hands clenched around the controller. “Are you saying I can vibe because there’s dark matter flowing _through_ me?”

“I’m saying the extradimensional energy in your system has made you more attuned to the frequencies of our own dimension. But yeah.” There was a manic glint in Harry’s eye that Cisco had seen in physicists before. It was never a good omen.

Screw it, though. Cisco was already sick of feeling out of control. He closed his eyes again, gripped the controller again, and listened. He could still feel too many frequencies around him, but they were muted now, subordinate to the vibrations of _something else_ around him, inside him, streaming through him like a thundering river. These particles were different, they shimmered strangely in his bones, and he knew without knowing that Harry was right, that they were from some Other Place. He could trace the flow of them from the space above him, down through his body, out the bottoms of his feet and deep into the floor. And if he could just _focus_ , like Harry said, he might be able to grasp it, bend it, take control of it even --

“Harry,” Cisco said through gritted teeth. “Say something. Anything, to block out the other sounds.”

“Okay.” Harry had stepped closer, Cisco could feel his photons right in front of him, hear his voice practically in his ear. “Focus, Ramon. Focus on the controller, on the car it’s connected to. Feel the electrons bouncing back and forth between them. Let it all move through you.”

The controller, the electrons. “How Obi-Wan of you. Keep talking.”

Harry chuckled. Cisco was almost distracted by how much he’d expected a corresponding breath to puff across his cheek. “Remember how it felt to vibe Snow. Harmon. Let the feeling take you again. But this time, it’s yours.”

_Mine --_

black, then blacker than black --

and Cisco’s eyes flew open, and the lab was gone.

He was in a different room, smaller but just as cluttered with bookcases and tools, with a window for sunlight to stream through and a regular, wooden door. Everything was blue and slow again, but Cisco could tell that in real life, the room would have been cozy and golden warm. A homey room. A room where someone --

Cisco turned, and there was Harry. Not hologram Harry, flesh-and-blood Harry ( _Wells? Are we still making distinctions?_ ), looking a little less lined and a little less gray, sitting at a desk and carefully attacking something with a screwdriver. Cisco stepped closer and looked over Harry’s shoulder. It was the RC vehicle, he knew immediately. And it wasn’t a car, it was a little shark on wheels, with a big smiling face and one of its fins raised in a wave. 

There was a sound outside the door, a child’s giggle followed by a crash. Harry’s head swiveled, and then he leapt to his feet and ran right _through_ Cisco --

Cisco gasped back to his body. Everything was spinning; the RC controller clattered to the floor. He reached for Harry instinctually, for something to ground himself, but his hands found nothing. 

“Ramon. Hey, Ramon. Cisco.”

Cisco froze, gulping air as his head slowly settled back securely on his neck. He blinked and managed to focus on Harry, who was still staticky from having an arm swiped through him. 

“Sorry about that,” Cisco panted.

Harry waved his apology away like it was a fly buzzing around his nose. “Nevermind, Ramon. What did you see?”

“Well.” Cisco swallowed, trying to get his sand-dry throat back to normal. “I know that the car is a dopey-looking shark thing. But I still don’t know where it is, because. You see, uh --”

“Spit it out.”

Cisco stuck his tongue out at Harry. “Because I vibed you, building it in what I guess was your home lab. I was going to apologize for, like, invading your privacy, but then I remembered you’re a dick, so.”

“Hm.” Harry ran his fingers through his hair again. “That would have been about ten years ago. Thirty, I mean. Jesse was six. She was obsessed with sharks that year.” He looked at Cisco, that smile beginning to crinkle around his eyes. “You vibed an event thirty years ago and a million miles away. Impressive.”

Much of the exhaustion drained out of Cisco’s chest, replaced by a springy sense of renewed energy. He cracked his knuckles. “I can’t believe you _actually_ just Jedi master-ed me. Can we do it again?”

Harry eyed him over the top of his glasses. “There will be time for that. Your body just took a lot of strain. Go rest with your friends. Eat something that’s not twenty-year-old coffee.”

“Fine.” Cisco couldn’t help but smile at Harry, despite everything. “But you’re coming too. I’m sure as hell not gonna be the one to tell everyone that you’re our new superhero trainer.”

\---

_Ramon is brave. I’ll give him that. He has to be, not to crumble in the face of all these changes, all these unknowns. All that power._

_There’s also the fact that he seems to actually like the hologram. And the hologram is basically Dr. Wells (it is getting harder to make distinctions), and I could count on one hand the number of people who have ever been brave enough to care about him._

\---

That night, Cisco slept in the med bay with the others. He still had dreams, this time about one of the _Providence_ doctors bustling about the bay, but they were less distinct, less painful. Cisco thought the doctor’s lab coat might have said “Hewitt,” but he couldn’t make out many more details beyond that, and he didn’t bother to try. The dreams slipped away easily instead of gripping him and not letting go, and when they did wake him, he had Barry’s rumbling snores to listen to until he drifted off again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, this chapter was less plotty and more angsty, so sorry/you're welcome, as the case may be, but I think it was necessary to set up a bunch of threads that are going to be important. More action and fluff to come, never fear.
> 
> Follow me on Tumblr at whatsinausername, if you're so inclined! I post chapter updates and other gay nerd shit. Thanks, as always, for reading!


	6. No, No, They Shatter

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay in getting this one up! Everything's been wild with job stuff and holiday stuff, not to mention this one was an absolute beast to write. But I'm super excited about it, and I hope you'll see why. Let's get to it.

Barry slid to a stop, the friction-resistant shoes Cisco had made him out of some loose polyphthalamide from Harry’s lab leaving skid marks on the cafeteria floor. “How was that?”

“Well, you definitely beat your best time,” Cisco said, flexing his thumb to work out the soreness. The joint popped ominously. “But I had to stop spamming the stopwatch button something like five hundred laps ago, so the world may never know how fast you truly are.”

“Your peak speed was one hundred and forty-nine meters per second, Allen,” Harry piped up, “seven meters more than yesterday.”

Still clutching his thumb, Cisco wheeled around to face Harry. “Wait, you’ve been tracking his speed with your dumb computer eyes this whole whole time? You couldn’t have mentioned that _before_ my career-ending injury?”

Harry popped an eyebrow. “You seemed so excited to use the stopwatch.”

“Sure, back when I was young and naive and thought I was gonna be like John Candy in _Cool Runnings_. But now my thumb may never be the same again.”

“Aw. Should we ask Snow to put it on ice?”

Cisco glanced around Harry’s shoulder at Caitlin. She was glaring, scowly and sour, at Harry’s back. “He meant, like, in the doctor capacity, Caitlin, not --”

“I know what he meant.” Caitlin crossed and uncrossed her arms, and it occurred to Cisco that maybe that was just her default expression now. God, he hoped not. “Do you actually want me to check your thumb or can I take Barry’s vitals now?”

Cisco nodded at her silently. As Caitlin went to scan Barry up and down with one of the tricorders from the med bay, Cisco widened his eyes at Harry in what he hoped was a _Cool it with the ice puns_ way.

Harry raised his palms in a tiny, indignant shrug. _I didn’t mean it like that, Ramon_.

Cisco jerked his head in Caitlin’s direction. _You should still apologize, dumbass, because she’s clearly --_

Iris cleared her throat, and Cisco jumped around to look at her where she sat on one of the tables they’d pushed to the sides of the cafeteria to clear space in the middle. “Caitlin,” she said kindly, “do you want to go next?”

“I'd rather not waste everyone’s time again,” Caitlin mumbled as she put a hand to Barry’s forehead.

“Come on, Cait, don’t get discouraged,” Barry said. “No one expects you to totally figure out your powers overnight.”

“You and Cisco basically did.” When she looked at him sidelong, Cisco realized that Caitlin’s eyes were bloodshot, like she hadn’t been sleeping. Or like she’d been crying. Or both.

“Ramon and Allen’s abilities have come easier to them because they are passive objects of the extradimensional forces flowing through them.” Harry was looking at Caitlin over the tops of his glasses, giving her what Cisco recognized from years of higher ed as the Stern But Fair Professor Stare. “Your abilities, however, require you to be the active subject, siphoning energy into the other dimension deliberately. It makes sense that you require more practice, but your powers will probably be more precise once you master them.”

The hard edges of Caitlin’s face softened, and when she nodded to Harry the gesture was hardly sad or grim at all. “Alright. One more try.”

Harry glanced at Cisco and raised his eyebrows almost imperceptibly. _Good enough?_

Cisco couldn’t help but smile. _Good enough_.

Like the last training session, Caitlin made them all stand as far away from her position in the middle of the cafeteria as they could get. Which seemed a little overly cautious, Cisco thought, given that all Harry was having her do was try to freeze a glass of water, and she hadn’t even managed to make a single ice cube last time. Still, Cisco perched on the table next to Iris and Barry, ready to cheer her on. Under any other circumstances, the sight of Caitlin silhouetted against the stars in the transparent wall behind her and glaring at the cup in her hand like it had just said that crinkle fries were better than curly fries might have looked a little silly, but the silence hung heavy and humorless as they all waited. 

“Focus on the heat of it, Snow.” Harry paced wide circles around Caitlin, rubbing his jaw in interest. It was hard to focus on Caitlin when Harry paced like that, Cisco found; there was something of the starship captain the cameras had loved in the square of his shoulders, the resonance of his voice. Something the eye couldn't help but be drawn to. “Heat, Ramon's vibes, Allen's speed, it's all just particles vibrating. Do you feel it?”

“Yes.” Caitlin's eyes were closed, and her voice was quiet but steady. 

“Take a minute. Get to know it. You're already holding it in your hand. Now hold it in the rest of your body, too.”

Caitlin nodded, gripped the cup tighter. 

Harry stepped toward her. Cisco saw his eyes flash. “Now rip it away.”

Caitlin sucked in a harsh breath through her teeth, and suddenly tendrils of ice were snowflaking through the glass of water.

“Whoa, Cait!” Barry leapt off the table, laughing incredulously.

“Oh my God.” Caitlin stared, wide-eyed, at the frozen-solid cup. Cisco noticed that there was also frost dusting her fingers and the ends of her hair, but it was already melting.

He jumped off the table and jogged toward her, grinning. “Knew you could do it, Frosty.” 

Caitlin shook her head exasperatedly at him and almost smiled back. “Nope, sorry, I’m vetoing that nickname right now.”

“We’ll workshop it.” Cisco held up a hand for a high-five. He saw Caitlin hesitate, but she didn’t leave him hanging, and when their hands connected she didn’t give him frostbite and he didn’t vibe her nasty future, so.

“Alright.” Iris clapped her hands together, all business. “Barry and Caitlin, let’s stay here and keep training. Cisco, do you want to take Harry down to the engine bay and do that thing you wanted to do?”

“What?” Harry was inspecting the ice in Caitlin’s glass, but he straightened and looked at Iris fast enough to rival Barry. “What do you --”

“I was telling Iris last night that I wanted to vibe the engine, to see if I can find out why it zapped your crew away, or why it started on its own when I touched it.” It occurred to Cisco that that weird expression on Harry’s face was panic, and he thought he knew the reason. “And if it energy blasts us when I touch it this time, it probably won’t make a difference, right? So you don’t have to worry.”

Harry crossed his arms very tightly. “I wasn’t --” he said, but then swallowed whatever he was about to say. “Right. But why do you need me there?” 

“Because if I learn anything you might have super secret memories about, I’ll need to ask you.”

“I don’t think there are many of those left, Ramon.”

“So then we’ll just have a fun science adventure, damn.”

A tiny smile teased at the corner of Harry’s mouth, but Cisco was distracted from how almost-cute it made him look by Iris rolling her eyes so hard he could have sworn they made a sound.

“Get going then,” she said. “I don’t pay you to stand around and bicker.”

“You don’t pay us at all,” Cisco and Harry muttered in unison. Iris snorted.

\---

_Let’s do a thought experiment. No, no reason. It’ll be interesting. Really, that’s all. Here it is:_

_Is falling in love ever a bad thing?_

_Some people, the kind who, I don’t know, watch_ The Princess Bride _and make little shuddering gaspy noises every time Buttercup and Wesley so much as look at each other, would say no. Love is great. Love is all sunsets and corny one-liners and making out on horseback, like that’s at all practical. Love is always a net positive._

_But anyone with half a brain knows that love can hurt, too. You could get your heart broken. The person you wanted to spend the rest of your life with with could die. You could fall for someone who’s literally, physically incapable of loving you back._

_And that’s just people. There are other things to fall in love with, other things that will crush you from the inside out. Harrison Wells, to give one totally random example, transferred most of his affections to his job after his wife died. And oh man, did he romance that job. Late nights together. Fairy-tale vacations to the moons of Jupiter. You’re the only one for me, baby, there’ll never be anyone else._

_Which is why, when Wells found out about the flaw in the dark matter engine on the eve of the launch, he reacted stupidly. Because love makes you stupid. He assumed that, because he had no proof, only what he had overheard DeVoe muttering to himself that night, no one would believe him. He assumed that nothing would be gained from derailing the launch at the last minute, over something he wasn’t even fully sure of himself. He assumed that DeVoe had been working to_ fix _the flaw in the engine, because that would be the reasonable, rational, right thing to do._

_But that was not what DeVoe did._

_You see, DeVoe was also in love. In love with an idea, a plan, a dream: that the human race would be better. That he could_ make _us better. That he could push us to rise above the mud and the violence and the stupidity that we’d been born into, and fly._

 _That idea was the love of DeVoe’s life. And, for a long time, the_ Providence _mission was enough for him. People traversing the galaxy, advancing science farther than anyone ever thought possible, working together to start new lives on a new planet? What’s not to love?_

_But then it stopped being enough, because he found a something better. Because he had fallen too hard. Because sometimes love makes you stupid, and sometimes it makes you a monster._

\---

The shadows in the engine bay had a bluish-purple tint to them now, thanks to the endlessly spinning vortex of dark matter at the center of the engine. It was dead silent -- the engine itself wasn’t running, after all, now that they’d gotten up to speed -- but Cisco’s head was full of the other kind of sound, the buzzing whooshing _roar_ of the the dark matter as it slipstreamed around him.

Harry was a little hazier down here, a little less solid and a little more prone to flickering out, like he was running on the upstairs neighbors’ wi-fi signal that didn’t quite reach through the ceiling. When Cisco made worried sounds, though, Harry assured him that he was fine.

“It doesn’t hurt, Ramon. It’s just annoying.”

“If you say so.” They stopped in front of the engine and Cisco craned his neck to look up at it. It was easier to look into the vortex now that he had dark matter in his blood or whatever, but it was still weird to be seeing something that wasn't supposed to be visible. “Hey, Harry?”

“Hm?”

Cisco swallowed around the sudden clench in his throat. “If I find out what happened to the crew… do you want me to tell you?”

Harry narrowed his eyes at him. “Of course I do.”

“Even if it’s, like --”

“Even if it’s bad. Even if it’s terrible. Even if it’s the worst thing you’ve ever seen, Ramon, you have to tell me.”

Cisco chewed on his lower lip and wished he could put a hand on Harry’s shoulder. “So you’ll know,” he murmured.

Harry’s eyes dragged over Cisco’s face like there were still answers to be found there. “So I’ll know.”

“Okay.” Cisco took a shaky breath. “I’m gonna touch the butt.”

The lines around Harry’s mouth softened from grim to teasing. “The _what_ \--”

“ _Finding Nemo_ , man, come on.” Cisco inched closer to the hulking base of the engine and put a hand out, feeling for the eddies of dark matter swirling through it. “Now do your Obi-Wan thing.”

“You really shouldn’t need me by now,” Harry said, but stepped close behind Cisco anyway to speak softly in his ear. “You’re so much better at this already.”

Cisco shivered involuntarily. Probably because his fingertips were a centimeter away from the surface of the engine, not because. Well. “You overestimate my power,” he said, trying to pitch his voice harsh and Sith-y like Hayden Christensen’s and failing miserably.

He heard Harry huff out a laugh. “Close your eyes then, Ramon.” Cisco did. “Reach out with your feelings. Or whatever.”

Cisco let his hand land on the engine, spread his fingers over the just-warm metal, felt the frequencies of two dimensions shoot through him.

“Listen for them,” Harry whispered, his voice shimmering along the strands of the universe with everything else. “ _Where did they go?_ ”

A flash of light, and then a flash of purple-blue darkness --

Cisco opened his eyes. It took him a minute to absorb what he was seeing, and as soon as he did he wished he hadn’t.

He was still in a cavernous room with the dark matter engine looming over everything, but it wasn’t the engine bay. The space was scattered with cluttered desks and untidy workstations, and among them stood a man that Cisco vaguely, horribly recognized. He was almost as tall as Harry, with curly hair and a wild triumph in his eyes, and he clasped his hands behind his back as he stood looking up at the engine. And inside the engine ring ( _oh God oh God_ ) stood another man, except he was tied in place, limbs spread and roped to the sides of the hulking machine. 

He was crying. His tears were _shining_ , running blue and luminous down his face.

“You,” said the curly-headed man, his voice echoing around the lab and the insides of Cisco’s skull, “are very lucky.”

The crying man whimpered. 

“You are one of the first, you see, of a new breed of man.” The scientist began pacing in front of the engine, in front of his terrified subject. “The dark matter has gifted you with abilities beyond what was previously believed possible. You have been improved. Evolved. _Enlightened_. You will help usher this world into a new age.”

The weeper’s sobs grew even louder, his face glowing in the dusky dim of the lab as tears flooded hot and luminescent from his eyes --

_CLIFFORD DEVOE._

Cisco jumped in shock at the same time DeVoe did.

The voice, or maybe it was a million voices, had come from everywhere and nowhere. It rattled Cisco’s bones and made the air _shift_ , like every quark in every molecule was spinning the opposite way now, and Cisco knew DeVoe had felt it, too, because he was trembling like a man unaccustomed to being afraid --

_WE CANNOT ALLOW YOU TO CONTINUE._

Cisco stumbled back to reality like he’d been drop kicked in the ass. Harry was right there, though, stooping to meet his eyes. 

“Ramon.” Harry’s hand twitched toward Cisco’s face, like he wanted to brush the hair out of his panicked eyes. “What did you -- did you see --”

Cisco did it for him, tucked his curls back behind his ears. “You didn’t know DeVoe was experimenting on people, did you?”

Harry’s eyes went wide. The glow from the dark matter made them a deeper, eerier blue. “No.”

“Well, he was.” Cisco ran his hand through his hair again. Kept it there, this time. Clenched. Pulled. “I think he wanted to give _everyone_ abilities. Starting with the _Providence_ crew, I’m guessing.”

Cisco watched the muscles in Harry’s jaw seize, practically heard his teeth grind. “That unbelievable _fucking_ \--”

“Harry, there’s more.” Harry clamped down on whatever innovative insult he was about to spew. Cisco took a breath and held it. “There was a voice.”

“A _voice_ \--”

And then Harry froze. Stared right through Cisco at something only he could see.

“Tell me later,” he growled. “Snow is going to break the goddamn ship.”

\---

When Cisco and Harry tumbled out of the elevator, they saw Barry doing his best to keep Iris back from the edge of the spiraling ice storm that had almost engulfed the whole cafeteria.

“ _Caitlin!_ ” Iris screamed over the howling wind, over the deafening rattle of hailstones bombarding the walls. “ _Come back to us!”_

Cisco squinted through all the white and, sure enough, there was a figure at the center of the storm, her knees curled against her chest and her arms over her head, her hair white with frost and whipping violently in the wind. Cisco ran to Barry and Iris, grabbed them both by the arms, and Iris looked ready to cry with relief as soon as she saw him and Harry.

“Oh, thank God,” she yelled. “Harry, can you counter her powers with the ship’s climate control?”

“What do you think I’ve _been_ doing?” Harry shouted back. “It’s not enough, she’s draining too much heat --”

“What happened?” Cisco asked.

“She was trying to freeze a pitcher of water,” Barry replied, “and she just -- she lost control, and the ice kept spreading --”

“I need to get to her.” Cisco wrapped his arms around himself, took a step toward the maelstrom. “I could talk her down if I could get to her.”

“Allen.” Harry filled the space between Barry and Iris, and the starship captain was back. Cisco even saw Barry stand a little straighter, at attention. “Can you clear a path through the ice?”

“I don’t know, I tried earlier but I think the cold slows me down --”

There was an ear-splitting _groan_ of shifting steel. 

“If it gets any colder in here, it'll threaten the structural integrity of the hull!” Cisco bellowed. He considered just walking through the ice storm. His skin would heal. Probably.

“Allen, you need to throw something at her.” 

Cisco whirled back around to face Harry. “ _Whoa_ now --”

“Nothing big enough to seriously injure her, obviously.” His eyes flickered back and forth between Cisco’s. Looking for permission, Cisco realized. “We just need to knock her out.”

There wasn’t any other way. Harry was right, as always. God, he was annoying.

“Fine,” Cisco shouted. “Barry, grab a table. And you better angle it right, so she doesn’t go all Flat Stanley.”

Barry squared his jaw and nodded. In a flash, he was standing at the edge of the freezing gale, lifting one of the round cafeteria tables over his head like it weighed nothing. He heaved back, glanced at Cisco, adjusted the angle, and _threw_ it with a crackle of sparking static electricity.

And they all watched the table arc through the air, barely buffeted by the wind at all because Barry had thrown so straight and so true --

and then the table _shattered_ , ripped apart into splintery shards by something, and Cisco only had a fraction of a second, only a few ticking vibrations of his molecules to see that what had done it was a spray of razor-sharp icicles --

they were coming toward him and the others _no no NO_ \--

Cisco didn’t even think when he tore a hole in the universe. It felt perfectly natural to fling his arms out in front of his friends and, in the same motion, open a breach in space-time that sparkled dark-matter blue and swallowed all of the ice shards whole. 

It wasn’t until the breach closed and Cisco was staggering backward into Barry and Iris that his arms started feeling like he had just jammed all of his fingers into electrical sockets.

“Oh,” he said faintly. “That’s new.”

Barry and Iris started babbling into his ears.

“That was _sick_ , dude, what even _was_ that --”

“You gotta sit down, you look like you’re going to --”

Cisco barely heard them, because he was too busy realizing what he had to do.

“I’m gonna portal over to her,” he said hoarsely. Barry and Iris both stopped mid-sentence and gripped his shoulders tighter. “I’m gonna talk her down.”

Cisco looked around at them all, just for a second. Barry’s mouth was hanging open; Iris’s was set in a grim line. And Harry -- no. It would’ve taken more time than Cisco had to decipher that look in Harry’s eyes.

So he just tossed another breach into existence (his arms didn’t hurt if he didn’t think about it too much), and he stepped through it --

another raging hurricane, not of ice but of energy and dark matter and a million dimensions sitting _just_ out of reach--

and Cisco fell out in the eye of Caitlin’s storm. He immediately fell to his knees, ignoring the needles of ice tearing into all his exposed skin, and wrapped his arms around Caitlin. She was so, so cold.

“You heard Iris,” he murmured into her ear. “Come back to us.”

Caitlin shivered. Her frost-caked hair crunched against Cisco’s cheek. “They’re angry,” she whispered, her voice high and strange.

“No, Caitlin, never, no one’s angry at you --”

Caitlin finally raised her head, then, and Cisco saw ( _thank God thank God_ ) that her eyes were still brown. But when she looked at him, there was a veil between them. “They’re upset,” she said, more to the middle distance than to him. “And lost, and lonely.”

Cisco took Caitlin’s freezing face between his hands, blinked the snowflakes out of his eyes, made her look at him. “It’s not real, Cait. I’m real, though. Feel that? I’m here.”

Caitlin’s pupils contracted, just a bit, like she was trying to focus on Cisco. The roaring of the storm got quieter, he thought. “They’re safe,” she breathed. “But _they’re_ still angry.”

“Okay,” Cisco whispered back, absolutely unable to think of anything else to say. “They are, though. They’re safe.”

A tear leaked out of Caitlin’s eye. She blinked it away, and it traced a warm path through the ice on her cheek. “Cisco?”

“Yeah, Caitlin.” Cisco laughed, and probably leaked a few tears of his own. “Yeah.”

\---

_Here’s another thought experiment: Is going through something traumatic ever a good thing?_

_That’s an easy one: No. But the aftermath, the way people deal with it, might not always be the worst._

_To give one totally random example: After they all make sure that Snow just needs sleep and some warm fluids, Ramon goes down to the lab with the hologram. Something about “raiding the captain’s quarters for those_ good _blankets.”_

_And they do. But instead of immediately taking them up to his friends in the med bay, Ramon makes himself a cocoon on Wells’ bed and looks at the hologram expectantly, like he wants the hologram to sit next to him. And the hologram does._

_“No harm in keeping these to myself for a few minutes,” Ramon says. “I can say I was preheating the blankets with my flesh, if the others ask.”_

_“I wouldn’t think they would begrudge you this,” the hologram grumbles, “considering you were the one who risked your ass breaching into that ice storm.”_

_Ramon shrugs. With his face poking out from under his blanket hood, he looks like a -- I don’t know, an Ewok? They’re sickeningly cute enough, I guess. “It’s no big deal,” he says, as if risking your life for your friends isn’t the biggest deal in the universe._

_“Stop that.” The hologram glares at him, though anyone who knows Wells would recognize that as his affectionate glare. Ramon probably knows, by now. “You were.” The hologram clears his throat. “You were incredible.”_

_“Damn, Harry, did your heart grow three sizes today?” Ramon can’t think he’s fooling anyone with that sarcasm, not with his face positively glowing from the praise._

_“It’s true. My only critique would be that you entirely failed to prioritize your own safety. But you’re not going to listen to me, so.”_

_“I don’t know, dude, I’m so cozy right now I might just do anything you say.”_

_(Anything?)_

_It’s dark in there, so Ramon doesn’t see the hologram blush. Stupid idea, programming a hologram to blush._

_\---_

_Another, not-so-random example: Snow has a different way of dealing with her trauma. Specifically by sneaking into the lab long after Ramon and the hologram have talked themselves to sleep, and stealing Jesse’s jacket. You know the one. With the serum patch. That one._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you're still reading after my impromptu hiatus of sorts, thank you so much for sticking with me! I promise the next few chapters won't be as far apart -- I'm gonna get, just, SO much writing done over the holiday break. As always, if you leave comments and kudos I will love you forever, and follow me on Tumblr at she-is-the-doctor for chapter updates and other nerd shit!


	7. Tall Guy, Not That Good-Looking

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> We're back and better than ever (and by better I mean "more rated M")! Now with adorable, beautiful, incredible art by panda-possum-adventures on Tumblr: https://panda-possum-adventures.tumblr.com/post/181292791452/i-miss-doing-fan-fic-art-so-much-3-biggg-thank

There was always a reasonable explanation for things. That was just science.

For example, the first time Cisco had The Dream, he knew it was a fluke, a bungle, a random chaos-theory twist of fate. Dreams were just your brain doing word association. Nothing less, and _definitely_ nothing more.

The second time, it occurred to Cisco that it might not be a fluke, even if two instances did not a pattern make. There was still a rational explanation, though -- they’d been spending a lot of time together, obviously, and there was nobody else on this stupid ship besides the friends that were more like his siblings and therefore not exactly featured players in his saucy dreams. And, unfortunately, Harry _was_ always reaching out like he’d forgotten he couldn’t touch Cisco and getting all up in his space during training or while they were tinkering in the lab. So it made some kind of sense that his unconscious mind would want to extrapolate, out of purely scientific interest, how Harry’s breath would feel against his ear, how his long fingers would feel trailing up his back, how his ridiculous hair would feel twisted in Cisco’s fingers as he kissed his way down his --

Okay, what? That one wasn’t extrapolating anything. Maybe Cisco’s sleeping brain was just a horny goddamn mess.

The third time he had The Dream, though, there was only one explanation left: Cisco was losing his mind. Something had to be done about it. He couldn’t keep waking up like ( _ugh, really?_ ) this.

\---

Iris was alone in the cafeteria, sipping serenely on her coffee and watching the stars slide by in the viewing wall. Cisco almost made to leave, since he hated to disturb her chill morning with his nonsense, but she saw him and smiled a welcome, so he knew it was okay to sit across from her.

“Morning,” she said. “Are Barry and Caitlin --”

“Still sleeping, per ushe.” He slumped toward her with his head propped on his fists, making his cheeks squish pathetically. “You know, Barry sleeping a lot I get, with all the training he’s doing, but Caitlin --”

“-- shouldn’t be so tired all the time, I know. I worry about her.” Iris eyed him over the top of her mug. “What’s up with you, though?”

“Iris,” Cisco said through guppy-fish lips, “I think I’m going crazy. I need a _project_.”

“Ahh.” She gave him that knowing smile that made her look exactly like her dad. “You’re getting antsy. Figures.”

“Yeah. Antsy.” That was one word for it. “I’ve explored the entire ship. Figured out what all the buttons on the flight deck do. Browsed through most of the in-flight entertainment in the rec room which, let me tell you, doesn’t seem like enough movies to last _me_ seven years, let alone a crew of two hundred and three people --”

“What about Harry’s lab?” Cisco’s dumb heart skipped a dumb beat, but if it showed on his face Iris didn’t seem to notice. “He’s got so many books. And all those, uh, tools? Circuits? Sautering... irons...”

“Okay, okay, you can stop trying to list engineering words. But see, like, Harry’s junk is fine for fooling around with -- I mean, ha, _fooling around_ , not fooling around --” _stop talking stop talking abort abort abort_ \-- “but there’s nothing in there that’ll keep me occupied for seven years. _Seven years_ , Iris. It hasn’t even been a month. Do you know how long seven years actually is?”

Iris gripped her mug tighter. “Yeah.”

“Seven years ago we were _twenty_. Sophomores in college, still hitting up that senior from my fluid dynamics class to buy us vodka. In seven more years we’ll be thirty-four. Can you even imagine being thirty-four?”

Iris kicked him gently under the table, which made him realize he’d been jiggling his leg frantically. “Of course I’ve imagined it, Cisco. When I thought about working at a newspaper, and having a home with Barry, and maybe a kid.”

_Haha. Fuck._

Cisco immediately forgot about The Dream and reached out and took Iris’s hand. She readily laced her fingers in his and squeezed. “You can still have that,” he said, even though as soon as he said it he knew it wouldn’t sound anything like the truth.

Iris knew it, too, and smiled sadly at him. “On an alien fucking planet? _Twenty_ years from now, on the off chance that someone from Earth comes to bring us home? Maybe. But I’m not counting on it.” She leaned forward, gave him that piercing look that made everyone who met her fall helplessly, happily into her orbit. “Because I’ve decided that, whatever happens, I’m going to work with it. All our lives, we’ve been asking _what if_. What if _Providence_ had taken off, what if we’d gotten to go to space, what if we weren’t stuck on Earth. This is the _what if_ , Cisco. And it’s whatever we decide to make of it.”

Cisco saw the reflections of the streaking stars in her eyes. “So what do I make of it?”

Iris snorted. “Like I could come up with anything that would keep that genius brain busy for seven years.”

_Seven years._

“What if it wasn’t seven years?”

Iris frowned at him. “What, you mean if we could go faster?”

“Exactly.” Cisco waggled a finger at her thoughtfully. He felt his leg start to tap again, but this time with purpose. “You know how I can rip terrifying holes through time and space now?”

“Oh, shit.” Iris’s eyes widened. “Could you make one big enough for the ship? And open it up far enough away to --”

“-- make a difference? I don’t know.” Cisco grinned, wide and urgent. “But I think I’ve found my project.”

Iris squeezed his hand again, bounced it up and down happily. “You should get Harry in on this.”

_For Christ’s sake._ “Should I? I mean, he’s already so busy with --”

“-- training you to use your powers?” 

“Okay, yeah, but --”

“Hey, Harry!”

_Pop._ “Morning, West.” Harry looked at Cisco before he could pretend to be busy watching the stars, or running away, or evaporating into dust _Infinity-War_ -style. “Ramon.”

Cisco gave what he hoped was a cool, nonchalant nod. As long as he didn’t have to say any words, he was golden.

But Iris was looking at him expectantly. He kicked her under the table. She kicked back, harder.

“Harry, _Cisco_ was _thinking_ ,” she said, her expression going slightly suspicious, “that he could get us to Proxima Centauri faster with his breaches.”

“Hm. Near-lightspeed not fast enough for you?” Harry was teasing, but Cisco could tell from the deepening lines of his forehead that the idea had grabbed ahold of him, that maybe he was already running simulations in his head.

“Yeah, you know me, always chasing that next thrill,” Cisco teased back, because that’s what they did. They teased each other in a totally normal, platonic way. “No, it’s just that some of us would like to not spend the next three-quarters of a decade doing sock slides through the empty corridors and endlessly rewatching _Doctor Who_.”

“Didn’t realize you...” Harry’s voice was soft, and trailed off into nothing as his eyes flicked back and forth through his calculations. “Theoretically, it’s possible. You think you could do it?”

Cisco let his face fall forward into his hands, just for a second. “We’d have to train a lot harder together, wouldn’t we?”

“Yes?” Cisco couldn’t see Harry’s face, but he could hear the confused, annoyed twist of his mouth in his voice. “Is that a problem, Ramon?”

“No. Not at all.” Cisco straightened up and gave his best everything-is-fine smile. Everything _was_ fine. Would be, anyway. Sometimes you just had sex dreams about people you had to see every day. Life went on.

“I’ll leave you to it.” Iris clapped Cisco on the shoulder as she got up to go, and he could have sworn that she flashed him that knowing smile again, angled exactly so that Harry wouldn’t see.

\---

_Why has Snow been so tired lately, you ask? Well, I’ll tell you._

_(Yes, I know Ramon is acting strange. I don’t know anything about that. I told you I can’t read his mind.)_

_Since the Polar Vortex incident, which is what Ramon has taken to calling it exclusively where Snow can’t hear him, Snow has spending every night in the bio lab, trying to replicate the serum that Wells put in Jesse’s jacket. It’s difficult, given that the patch is twenty years old; the serum has dried up, many of its components have sublimated or decayed, and it’s still, you know, just a tiny bit radioactive._

_(I know, I know. I promise, it wouldn’t have been enough to hurt Jesse. Probably. Would have been nothing next to the dark matter, at least.)_

_But Snow is -- would have been, will be, whatever -- an excellent doctor. So she’s making good progress. Or bad progress, if you’re the kind of person who thinks that using an untested, dark-matter-infused, DNA-altering medicine on yourself is a bad idea._

_(Ramon would definitely think so. And though I don’t exactly have a moral leg to stand on here, I think I’m inclined to agree with him.)_

\---

On that first day, Harry made Cisco breach from the flight deck down to each successive level of the ship. By the time he made it to the engine bay, Cisco was sweaty and shaking and his arms felt like they were about to shrivel up and fall off, but it was farther than he had ever breached before. 

(He had The Dream again. Given the fact that breach training provided many fewer opportunities than vibe training for Harry to, say, stand just behind Cisco and whisper gruffly in his ear, Cisco may have expected his dreams to have chilled the fuck out, but no such luck. Still, it was fine. Being with Harry was still nice, easy. Everything was fine.)

A few days later, Cisco graduated to throwing breaches outside of the ship. While Iris coached Barry through running loop-de-loops over the cafeteria ceiling behind them, Cisco and Harry sat cross-legged in front of the viewing wall. Harry grunted encouragement as Cisco coaxed little blue sparks out of the darkness before them. Soon they were bigger than sparks, almost the size of his regular breaches, and though every one flicked out of sight almost faster than Cisco could blink, Harry assured him that he could tell the breaches were stable. 

“With my _dumb computer eyes_ , Ramon,” he said, when Cisco raised a skeptical eyebrow at him. “Trust me, they’re technically perfect.”

“You’d tell me if they weren’t, though?”

“Ramon. If I’ve ever done anything to make you think I would coddle you like that --”

“Oh, right, sorry, _perish_ the thought.”

And Harry’s dumb computer eyes wrinkled in that smiley way, and his shoulder drifted toward Cisco’s like he wanted to bump them companionably together. 

(Everything was fine. Having frisky dreams about someone didn’t have to be weird unless you made it weird. Granted, The Dream started to morph and multiply into more like a rotating roster. Variations on a theme, so to speak. Successive movements in the _What would Harry feel like inside me_ Symphony. 

If anything, it just made Cisco train harder. Because no way was he letting his brain spend seven years trying to convince him he was into Harry, who he couldn’t fuck even if he’d actually wanted to.)

After a few more days, it was time to start growing his baby breaches into burly breach men that could swallow a starship. Cisco arrived at the cafeteria before Iris and Barry that morning, feeling tired and weird. He clutched his replicator latte for strength and called out to Harry.

Harry didn’t appear. No _pop_ , no quip, no nothing.

“Harry?”

Still nothing. Cisco started to panic -- the ship’s computer was down, Harry was gone, they were gonna careen off course and the engine would malfunction and explode them into quark dust --

“Harry, if this is some kind of joke, let me be the first to tell you --”

_Pop._

“ _What?_ ”

Harry said it through gritted teeth, through clenched fists and bloodshot eyes. He was practically trembling with tension, about to go supernova, all the long lines of him threatening to collapse, then explode.

“Harry,” Cisco breathed, “what’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

“Oh, clearly. What took you so long to answer me?”

Harry turned and stalked away across the cafeteria. “What am I, your secretary? Your servant?”

“Harry, _what?_ ”

“I don’t have to come like a -- like a _dog_ every time you call me, Ramon, I have other -- I have my own --”

Harry kicked at one of the cafeteria chairs and _yelled_ when his foot passed straight through and his whole body flickered. 

“Okay, _stop_.” Cisco followed after Harry and shooed him towards one of the tables. “Sit the hell down, breathe, and tell me what’s going on with you.”

To his mild surprise, Harry did as he said, collapsing into a nearby chair and dropping his face into his hands, elbows on his knees. Cisco waited for him to speak, counting his deep, harsh breaths.

“I was double checking the date on Earth.” Harry’s voice was muffled in his palms. “It’s… complicated. With the relativity.”

Cisco knelt in front of Harry. It was so hard to know what to do with his hands, when he couldn’t use them to rub Harry’s knees soothingly like he kind of wanted to. “What day is it, Harry?”

“August 31st. Jesse’s birthday.” 

“Oh.” Cisco twisted his fingers in his lap. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.” 

Cisco waited some more. Watched Harry take off his glasses, screw up his eyes, and pinch the bridge of his nose, hard. Heard Harry sigh.

“Her favorite cake was carrot. She used to get sad when we’d send her to school with cupcakes and the other kids wouldn’t eat them because of the raisins.”

Cisco chuckled wetly. “Yeah?” 

“And she never -- if she couldn’t blow out all the candles in one breath, she made us relight them so she could try again. And every year, even when she got older, the only thing she asked for was a trip to the planetarium. Even after the year I lost her in the Mars exhibit and had the entire place shut down so I could find her.”

Cisco thought back to his vibe, to the sound of the little girl scream-laughing right outside Harry’s workshop. To the look on Harry’s face when he heard her wipe out, like making sure Jesse was safe was what he’d been built for, and everything else was just bonus features.

Harry opened his eyes. His eyebrows knit together briefly like he was surprised to see Cisco kneeling in front of him. Cisco saw his jaw work, chewing on his tongue or whatever he was about to say.

“She would have liked you,” Harry finally whispered. Cisco’s breath hitched in his chest. “And you would have liked her. She would have told me --”

Harry’s words were cut off in a strangled sound, and he looked down at his hands again. Cisco ignored all the particles in his body screaming at him to _not do that, motherfucker_ and brought his hands up to grip the sides of Harry’s chair. He thought he heard Harry inhale sharply, just a little, thought he felt Harry lean in a little closer, but his thoughts were being traitorous assholes at the moment and were not to be trusted. 

“She would have told you,” Cisco murmured, “that it’s okay to be sad, or angry, or whatever this is. That you’re allowed to grieve. That you’re doing your best, and that’s enough.”

Harry shook his head, infinitesimally. Their foreheads were almost touching. Or would have been, if they could touch. 

“No, for real, we don’t have to train today,” Cisco continued. “I could just tell the others you’re, I don’t know, running diagnostics on the ship’s mainframe. They won’t even ask what that means.” 

Harry huffed out an almost-laugh and looked at Cisco, his mouth slightly open. Cisco didn’t look at his mouth. And Harry definitely didn’t look at his, or inch even closer like Cisco was a star and Harry was just letting himself succumb to the gravity--

“No,” Harry said. “Let’s get to work.”

And he stood up very suddenly, so Cisco had to scramble back on his heels to avoid phasing through him, and marched towards the open center of the room. “Get up, Ramon,” he said, his voice barely sounding rough with grief or anything else. “I want to triple the surface area of your breaches by the end of the day.”

Cisco rolled his eyes, but heaved himself to his feet and followed Harry. And, even though his blood was buzzing furiously, by the end of the day he’d opened a breach as high as the vaulted ceiling of the cafeteria. When he did it, Harry smiled. It was fine. Everything was fine.

\---

_(Okay, what. What was that. The hologram is -- and Ramon isn’t making it any better, with his --)_

_Stop. Focus._

_Snow. Snow is getting close to replicating the formula. Her progress is making it look, to the others, like she’s starting to feel better. She still sleeps all morning and brushes off their questions about how she’s doing, but sometimes she eats dinner with them and laughs at Allen’s jokes. Soon, though, she’ll have finished the serum, and she’ll show it to Ramon first, probably, and Ramon will be terrified for her and she won’t listen --_

_(She should listen to him. Ramon will be right, he’s always right, and he cares about all of them so damn much --_

_Christ. What is wrong with me.)_

_She’s better at containing it now. But sometimes, late at night, Snow’s powers still creep over her. Her hands clench up, the air in the lab goes ice cold, and her mind -- well, it’s hard to explain. But I think that her mind slips, along with all the energy she’s siphoning, into the dark matter dimension. The Other Place, Ramon’s been calling it. Good a name as any._

_She doesn’t understand yet, but she’s seen the Other Place, and she’s seen the truth. She spoke it, even, while Ramon held her close in the eye of that swirling snowstorm. It just won’t make sense until --_

_(Until what, old man? Stop getting your goddamn hopes up.)_

\---

The first time Cisco brought the _Providence_ through a breach, he was 97 percent sure they weren’t going to make it.

There were so many ways it could go wrong. The breach could be unstable, causing them to all die instantly (boring). He could make the breach too small, sending just the middle of the ship forward in space and leaving them with a _Providence_ donut (slightly more interesting, as causes of death go). He could open a breach into another dimension by accident, perhaps a universe populated entirely by starship-eating space eels ( _now_ we’re talkin’). All of those possibilities had haunted Cisco’s dreams, among other things.

But when he actually did it -- actually ripped a massive, rippling blue hole in the vacuum of space large enough to swallow the _Providence_ and catapult it forward a full quarter of a lightyear along their trajectory, by Iris’s readings -- it felt almost anticlimactic. The ship didn’t shudder apart beneath them. Cisco’s brain didn’t start bleeding. There were no space eels. Everything was fine.

Still, Cisco’s friends practically suffocated him in a group hug like he’d just saved them all from certain doom. Which, maybe he kind of had, Cisco thought as he let Barry twirl him off his feet and around the flight deck. Maybe none of them had ever quite dared to speak aloud how likely it was that seven years in space with nothing but their thoughts and their terrifying powers would have been the death of them. Not of their bodies, necessarily, but of the softer parts of them -- the parts that needed a planet under their feet, and a sky to look up at. 

Cisco saw those soft parts of his friends come back from a brink he hadn’t realized they’d all been standing on. Saw it in Barry’s wild grin, in Caitlin’s gentle squeeze of his hand, in the way Iris’s killer high-five turned into another desperate, rocking-back-and-forth, brink-of-tears hug. 

He didn’t see quite the same change in Harry. Cisco hadn’t asked him how he felt about the plan to get to Proxima Centauri faster. Hadn’t asked what their arrival on the exoplanet would mean for Harry. Hadn’t had a glimmer of a clue what he would do with the answer. But even if Harry wasn’t looking quite as ecstatic as the others, he was still watching Cisco with _something_ in his eyes, something gentle and deep, like a hole Cisco suspected he would never climb out of, if he let himself fall. 

Still, he found himself drifting ever-so-slightly away from the tightly-packed joy of his friends and towards Harry. “Stop looking at me like that, dude,” he said quietly. ( _Don’t stop._ ) “We both know that getting sappy makes your brain short-circuit.”

Harry snorted, then leaned in close so Cisco could hear him over Barry’s renewed, happy shouting. “Alright,” he said against Cisco’s ear. “Then I won’t tell you how amazing you were.”

Cisco let his eyes flutter closed for an instant, maybe to preserve the final moment in which he could definitively say he had anything resembling a self-preservation instinct.

“No, tell me,” he whispered back.

Everything was so, so far from fine.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading, as always! If you want to make my Christmas and leave a comment, feel free. But I really just want to wish you all happy holidays, and say thank you again from the bottom of my heart!


	8. I Can Open Your Eyes

_They make record time._

_Well, any amount of time they took getting to Proxima Centauri would have been a record, since they’re the first, but you know what I mean. With Ramon’s breaching, they’re over halfway there in about three weeks. It takes a lot out of him, of course, so he can only breach the ship once every few days. But in between, he gets to rest a lot, and West brings him coffee and Allen tells him stories and the hologram watches movies with him late into the artificial nights, so he seems -- I don’t know. He seems happy._

_I want him to be happy. That’s not weird, is it? I’ve been watching him long enough. Makes sense that I’ve gotten a little invested._

_(What are you -- stop looking at me like that. “Invested” is too the right word. Shut up.)_

\---

Sometimes, when he was feeling particularly out of his mind with post-breach exhaustion and unresolved tension and a brand new emotion he’d tentatively begun to call the Deep Space Blues, Cisco imagined how each of his friends would respond if he told them he had a whatever-he-had for Harry. He’d never _not_ told them when he had a crush. Even junior year of undergrad, when he’d had it bad for _both_ Professors Snart, Lisa in the engineering department and Len in history, and the three of them had teased him mercilessly about it all semester, it had been good to know that they knew. To not be alone in his longing.

Barry, he imagined, would stare open-mouthed at him for a full eight to ten seconds. _Well, uh, that’s. Wow,_ he would stutter, rubbing the back of his neck nervously and staring at a point just over Cisco’s left ear. _I mean, I guess I can see how you would -- ‘cause you guys are always, you know -- but, like._ And Barry would take a deep breath, cringe with every muscle in his body, and look directly at him. _Isn’t Harry kind of… made of light?_

And Cisco would say _Yes, Barry, you're right, and I'm made of dumbass. Crush discontinued, thank you for your insight._

But then Barry would get an Iris-shaped twinkle in his eye. _I don't know, man. You really like him?_

_I think so._

_Then you gotta go for it, right?_

Okay, forget Barry. 

Iris would sigh and do her absolute best not to laugh at him, for which Cisco would be grateful even though he would know he deserved it. _I think_ , she would say, taking his hand, _that love should feel like sharing your whole heart with someone, not tearing it in half._

And Cisco would say _Brilliant, Iris, thank you for your wisdom. I’ll stop fantasizing about climbing Harry like a grumpy, handsome tree right away._

But then Iris would say, with a Barry-shaped bent to her smile, _But wait, it's not just about wanting to jump his bones, right? He makes you happy._

_Hey hey hey, you just said --_

_I know what I said._ And she'd sip her coffee matter-of-factly and say, _But life's also too fuckin’ short, Cisco._

So Iris was off the table, too.

Caitlin -- well. Caitlin was a little harder to talk to these days. But if she was feeling up to it, she’d probably say something like _I don’t know, Cisco. If anyone can figure out how to make it work with a hologram, it’s probably you._

And he would say _Thanks for your faith in my, uh, software engineering skills, but I think I must have missed the How to Make Love to Your Computer Boyfriend unit in my heuristic programming class._

And Caitlin would say _Hey, at least you might have someone, and also aren’t slowly being consumed by your extradimensional ice powers --_

And Cisco would say _Come on, you know I didn’t_ \--

“Cisco?”

Caitlin, of all people, was standing in the rec room door.Cisco turned and put on his best I-totally-wasn’t-just-arguing-with-you-in-my-head face. “Hi, hey. Hello.”

“Hi.” Caitlin sat down on the one couch cushion that Cisco wasn’t taking up with his lounging. Before everything, Cisco wouldn’t have hesitated to plop his feet into her lap so she could drum little rhythms on his ankles with her fingers. Now, Caitlin’s lap was full of her tightly clasped hands. He could see the tendons twitching in her thumbs. “Are you busy?”

Cisco sat up on his elbows. “I had planned a pretty full afternoon of lying here and staring up at the ceiling, but I think I can squeeze you in.” 

The corner of Caitlin’s mouth twitched up, but she didn’t look up from her hands. “There’s something I need to show you. In the bio lab.”

“Okay.”

“You can’t tell Barry or Iris.” She glanced at him, the barest flash of eye contact. “Or Harry.”

“Um.” Wariness settled heavy in his chest, but Caitlin was talking to him, finally. He couldn’t say no to her. “You got it. Lead the way.”

\---

The bio lab was an organized disaster -- beakers and bottles crowded on every surface, rows and rows of petri dishes arrayed in various states of reaction. Cisco had seen Caitlin in the throes of an obsessive project plenty of times and immediately recognized the signs. Usually, though, she told him about it before she got this deep, so he could bring her late-night cookies and convince her to go to sleep occasionally. 

“So this is why you’ve been so tired lately, I guess?” 

Caitlin looked at him out of the corner of her eye as she moved a rack of test tubes aside. “You’ll understand when I show you what I’ve been doing.”

“But why haven’t you told --”

Cisco’s question died in his throat. Caitlin was holding a neatly folded crew member’s jacket. It was the same as every other, as the ones they’d all been wearing themselves for weeks. But Cisco would have recognized that one anywhere.

“Jesse’s jacket,” he said grimly. “Caitlin, what did you --”

“I’ve replicated the serum Harry put in the patch.” Caitlin squared her jaw. Fixed him with her ready-to-fight look, which he would have found endearing under any other circumstance.

“Caitlin.” Cisco stepped forward, ready to -- he didn’t know what, but it suddenly felt very important that he be close enough to catch Caitlin as she fell. “You can’t.”

“Yes, I can.” Her nostrils flared. Cisco winced, bracing for a spray of ice bullets, and hated himself for it. “You don’t understand.”

“I don’t think I have to be a doctor to understand that injecting yourself with some kind of untested dark matter medicine is a _bad idea_.” Cisco’s voice was growing louder than he usually let it. He couldn’t find it in him to care. “You gotta at _least_ consult Harry first, whose head I seem to remember you almost biting off, by the way, when you found out he tried to use this on Jesse --”

“Harry’s not a medical doctor either. And that was different --” 

“You don’t even know if it’ll work!” Cisco pressed his hands together, to ground himself or to plead, he wasn’t sure. “Harry designed the serum to _prevent_ the dark energy from affecting Jesse, and now that you’ve already been affected you have no idea what it’ll --”

“I didn’t bring you here to argue, Cisco.”

“Oh yeah? Why did you, then? So there would be someone to drag your unconscious body to the med bay when you go into convulsions?”

“I wanted you to know, because you’re my _friend._ ” Caitlin’s eyes brimmed with furious tears. Her fingers tightened, white-knuckled, around the jacket. “But I’m going to do it whether you approve or not. I can’t wait anymore. I need to cure myself.”

“Caitlin.” Cisco curled his hands around her shoulders. Felt her flinch. Felt his heart break a little. “It’s not about -- you’re not sick, you don’t need a cure, you just need to come back to training and --”

Caitlin shrugged him off. “Easy for you to say, with your _phenomenal cosmic powers_ and -- and Barry, who’s just a classic fucking _superhero_ now -- you don’t get it, either of you, you _can’t_ , because you can do amazing things, and all I can do is lose my mind and nearly kill us all!”

“Cait, I --”

“Stop.” One of the tears finally fell from Caitlin’s eye onto Jesse’s jacket. She scrubbed at her face with the sleeve of her uniform. “Don’t make me lose control and hurt you, Cisco. Don’t you dare.”

And she shoved the jacket into his hands, and his vision went black.

\---

It took longer than usual for the darkness to loosen its grip on him. Like he was vibing farther or deeper or more forbidden. Like he had to swim through more layers of the universe. 

\---

Eventually, Cisco opened his eyes. He was in a small, empty room flooded with golden light. Empty, that is, except for the chair next to the window, and the teenage girl with brown hair sitting in it.

She turned to look at Cisco -- no, _through_ Cisco, because he was vibing, and she couldn’t see him. 

“What are you doing here?” she said. Her voice was sweet, and her eyes were a bright, familiar blue.

Cisco twisted around to look behind him for whoever she must have been speaking to. There was nobody there. Just a closed door.

“I’m talking to you, silly.”

He whirled back around to face the girl. “You can _see me?_ ”

She inclined her head curiously, and a tiny frown creased between her eyebrows. “Should I not be able to?”

“No. Usually this is a Pensieve from _Harry Potter_ situation.” The eyes. The searching expression. “Are you Jesse?”

The girl frowned deeper, like she had to think about it. “I think so.” Then her frown disappeared, and she smiled radiantly at him. “No, yeah, I am. Thanks for reminding me. It can be easy to forget, after all this time.”

_Okay,_ _what?_ Cisco stepped closer, trying to gauge exactly how old she was, when in her life this might have been. Whether Harry would have told him if Jesse had ever had some kind of amnesia situation going on. Or an “I see vibing people” situation. “What do you mean, Jesse?”

“I mean, I think it’s been a long time. Time works differently here.” Jesse leaned forward conspiratorially. “Do _you_ know how long we’ve been gone?”

Cisco’s heartbeat kicked into overdrive. “Who’s _we?_ ”

Jesse also had the same _You’re an idiot, Ramon_ face as her dad. “The crew of _Providence I_ , of course.”

_No._

_What?_

_No way._

Cisco blinked, trying not to betray how much he felt like Barry had just speed-kicked him in the gut. It was like jumping to sub-lightspeed all over again. _Breathe through it, Ramon._

“You mean --” his mouth was so, so dry -- “you mean you’re all --”

“We’re all here, yeah.” Jesse glanced idly out the window, then towards the closed door. “The others are around, somewhere.”

_The others._ If Cisco let himself contemplate the full implications of that, he was not going to be able to stay on his feet. “Jesse,” he said slowly, urgently, “where’s _here?_ ”

She fixed her eyes on him again. “It’s hard to explain.”

“Can you _try?_ ”

Jesse chewed her lip. “You found me. So you already know about this place, even if you don’t realize.”

Cisco breathed in, breathed out.

Harry, in the med bay. _Dark matter exists both in our universe and somewhere_ else _, some other, parallel dimension… The energy that affected you comes from this other place, and your abilities are rooted in your connection to it._

In, out.

Caitlin, in the eye of the storm, looking through him at something only she could see. _They’re upset. And lost, and lonely. They’re safe. But_ they’re _still angry._

In --

A chorus of voices from everywhere and nowhere, voices like thunder and hurricanes and the rush of dark matter past his ears --

_WE CANNOT ALLOW YOU TO CONTINUE._

“This is the Other Place,” Cisco exhaled. “And it -- it _took_ you.” 

Jesse nodded, almost imperceptibly. She did look upset, and lost, and lonely. “They had their reasons,” she whispered. “But --”

And then Cisco was struck by lightning.

That’s what it felt like, anyway, as his vision crackled apart into painful white shards, as his whole body fizzed like a radio tower at the center of an electrical storm, as he felt his mind being _squeezed_ in the fist of something big and raging and broken --

and he thought he might have been back in the lab, and Caitlin was standing over him mouthing worries he couldn’t hear over the tempest in his head --

and he thought she might have turned into Jesse, scrambling from her chair to reach out to him --

and he thought he might have been somewhere else, where the air was cold and glistening with all the colors of the rainbow, and a deep, discordant voice was chuckling viciously in his ear:

_Good. You’re on your way._

And then Cisco gasped back to the golden room. He was on his hands and knees, and Jesse was indeed kneeling by his side, looking terribly like a young girl with no idea what to do. When she tried to touch his face, her hand phased through him.

“Come find us, Cisco.” Her voice echoed softly in his head and across the multiverse. “You’re the only one who can.”

\---

Caitlin was already in full doctor mode when Cisco crashed back to awareness on the floor of the bio lab, which was good because everything hurt.

“Oh, thank God, you’re back,” she said when she saw his eyes stammer open. “Cisco, you collapsed while vibing and your nose is bleeding. I need to get you to the med bay and make sure you’re not having a cerebral aneurysm, or a focal onset seizure --”

“I’m not.” Cisco sat up suddenly, surprising Caitlin enough to make her stop fluttering her hands over his chest. His head was pounding, but he didn’t care. “I have to talk to Harry, right now.”

“ _Cisco_ , you need to --”

“Stay here.” He grabbed Caitlin by the shoulder and made her look him in the eyes. “Stay here and don’t -- don’t do anything until I get back, okay?”

Caitlin nodded silently. And Cisco trusted her with every particle in his body, even if that made him a fool.

He went to the flight deck, because he knew nobody would be there. On the way, he had to lean against the wall of the elevator to stay upright. He wiped at his nose, and blood smeared darkly all along the sleeve of his uniform. He made sure not to get any on Jesse’s jacket, clutched safely in his other arm.

When the elevator deposited him on the flight deck, Cisco gripped the back of the captain’s chair for support before calling out.

“Harry.”

_Pop._ “Hey, Ramon, what’s --” Harry froze at what must have been the very upsetting sight of Cisco’s bloody, sweat-drenched face. “What the _hell_ , Ramon? Are you --”

“I’m fine.” Harry’s mouth flattened into a skeptical line. Cisco made himself hold Harry’s gaze, suddenly unsure if he could handle what was coming. “There’s something I need to tell you, and I thought you might not want all the others to be around when you hear it.”

“Jesus.” Harry crossed his arms like his hands would have vibrated away if he hadn’t. “Spit it out, then, so I can get you to the med bay.”

Cisco held up the jacket. He could still feel it resonating faintly with all the strange, golden frequencies of the Other Place. “I vibed Jesse.”

“I was present for most of her life, Ramon, I don’t need --”

“Listen to me, Harry.” Cisco inhaled as deep as he could through his blood-choked nose. “I vibed where she is _now_. She’s alive.”

Cisco saw the exact moment when Harry stopped breathing. He went so still that Cisco might have thought his projector was malfunctioning, except that his eyes were raking desperately over Cisco’s face.

“Don’t.” Harry’s voice was barely louder than the thudding of Cisco’s heart in his ears. “You can’t -- you’re not allowed to say that to me, unless you’re sure.”

“I’m sure.” Cisco was sure of so few things. This, at least, was one of them. “She’s in the Other Place. Her and the rest of the _Providence_ crew.”

Harry pressed his hands to his mouth and stumbled back like Cisco had shoved him. Cisco heard the exact moment when he started breathing again, big, wracking, sobbing breaths that bent him double. Cisco dropped the jacket and fell to his knees in front of Harry, and through a series of gentle but firm hand gestures got him to lean up against the pilot console. Cisco settled against it too and let Harry cry, wishing there was literally anything else he could do.

After a long while, Harry sniffed loudly and pressed the heels of his hands under his glasses and into his swollen eyes. “Is she.” He swallowed thickly. “Is she older?”

“No.” Cisco brushed his hair behind his ear. “She still looked sixteen, anyway. She said time was weird in there.”

Harry nodded, then lowered his hands and looked at Cisco. His eyes, the ones he had passed on to Jesse, were still shining with tears, but he didn’t look sad -- he looked ( _oh_ ) like he’d never seen the sun before, and Cisco had just handed it to him on a silver platter. 

“Tell me everything,” Harry whispered.

Cisco did. The creepy room, Jesse’s lost expression, the Other Place having its “reasons,” the mysterious interference that had broken his vibe and the blood vessels in his nose. Harry listened quietly, the fluttering rise-and-fall of his chest getting steadier the more Cisco told. 

When he finished, Harry swallowed again. Cisco saw him sift through all the infinite questions being generated in his head. “She looked safe, at least? Healthy?”

“Not a scratch on her.”

“Good.” Cisco got the distinct impression that, if he had given any other answer, Harry wouldn’t have let anything so mundane as quantum physics stop him from straight-up fighting the interdimensional dark matter entity that had taken his daughter. “Do you think the interference was from the Other Place?”

Cisco remembered the rainbows, and the voice that had sounded too much like regular human hate. “No. It was from someone else.”

“Hm.” Harry’s gaze fell to the blood on Cisco’s lips. “Whoever it was, I won’t let them hurt you again.”

Cisco tilted his head at a teasing angle, but the smile that stole across his lips was painfully real. “Big words, Harry.”

Easy as anything, Harry reached for Cisco’s face like he was going to wipe away the blood, or run his fingers through his hair, or or _or_ \-- but just before his fingers would have flickered through Cisco’s cheek, Harry stopped. And he closed his hand into a fist, pulled it back, brought it briefly to rest on his mouth. He squeezed his eyes shut again and bumped the back of his head soundlessly against the console.

“You said --” Harry hissed in a breath like it hurt. “You said the _whole_ crew --”

“Yeah.” And Cisco was pretty sure he knew what Harry was asking, because it had also been his first thought. Because how could it not be. But he had already decided that he wasn’t going to think about that, because all the possibilities he knew Harry was considering had slid slippery and hazardous through Cisco’s mind, too, and he wasn’t about to lose himself in that nebulous danger zone when Harry, this Harry, was right in front of him, being as real as he knew how to be.

“Hey,” Cisco said. Harry grumbled an acknowledgement low in his throat, but didn’t open his eyes. Cisco tipped his head upwards, for strength. “I’m not, um. Concerned. About that.”

Cisco saw it in his periphery when Harry turned to look at him. He kept trying to burn holes in the ceiling with his eyes as he continued. “Let’s just figure out how to get back there. How to get Jesse home.”

Cisco turned back toward Harry, then. Harry was ( _oh, oh no_ ) looking at him Like That again. And if Cisco had been worried about keeping his heart in one piece -- well. He pictured twisting his hands in Harry’s sweater and reeling him in as close as he could get. Let himself imagine, outside the confines of his wretched dreams, whether Harry’s mouth would taste like salt or sarcasm or something sweeter. How it would feel to breathe comforting words against his lips. Whether Harry would gasp through his nose when Cisco kissed the tear tracks off of his cheeks. 

If some of that made its way onto his face, Cisco was past caring. He was tired of not letting himself want. And Harry -- if Cisco was right, if he wasn’t still imagining, Harry kind of looked like not wanting had never even occurred to him.

“Thank you,” Harry murmured. “Cisco.”

Cisco was sure of so few things. One of them was that it was too late for his torn-up, idiot heart.

\---

_(You. You saw him. He was here.)_

_(I can’t believe he was here and you didn’t come get me. You’re -- you’re grounded. You’re so grounded.)_

_(I know, I know.)_

_(I’m fine, really. Better -- better than fine. I never thought it would be possible, never thought I was allowed to hope --)_

_(Yes, damn it. You were right, as always. Are you really going to make me say it? I do, okay? I do.)_

_(He’s not my boyfriend, Jesse. Jesus. But yes, he’s going to need our help. So let's get to work.)_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Shout out to everyone who was speculating about where the starship crew went and who the narrator was -- this one's for you! Whether you got it right or not, your comments have warmed my heart and also been super helpful in making sure I was writing the mystery well. And now, of course, there's more mystery, so we're back to the drawing board. 
> 
> Thank you all for reading, for commenting, and for helping me stay motivated as I write this monster. We're halfway there! Over the hump!


	9. Demigods and Would-Be Gods

_My name is Harrison Wells. I had forgotten, for a while. Or I didn’t want to remember. But now I do, because of him. So no more of this third-person-omniscient garbage. From here on out, I tell my own story._

_My name is Harrison Wells. My crew calls me Captain. Jesse calls me Dad. And Ramon calls me Harry -- or he might, once he knows me._

\---

“So. Wait.” 

Cisco looked up at Barry, watching the gears visibly turn behind his friend’s eyes. Harry had refused to let Cisco call the others straight up to the flight deck, insisting instead that they convene in the med bay.

(“You and Caitlin, I swear to God, I think I'd _know_ if I was having an aneurysm --”

“Maybe. But you should still get a check-up after being brain-blasted by mysterious, evil space entities, Ramon.” And Harry had looked fondly down his nose at Cisco, and he was riding the elevator with him even though he didn't have to, and it was very hard to argue with that.)

So, while Cisco had explained what he’d vibed to all of them from his cot, Barry and Iris sat at his bedside, Caitlin bustled around him running tests and gently wiping the blood from his face, and Harry parked himself against the wall next to the cot’s headboard, watching Caitlin’s hands. The concern on all their faces had melted into confusion, then shock, then deeper confusion as Cisco told them what he’d vibed. 

“You’re saying that the Other Place,” Barry continued, “which is, you know, a _place_ , a _dimension_ \-- it has a mind of its own?”

Cisco would have nodded, but Caitlin was shining an otoscope in his ear. “Yeah, Jesse said it ‘had its reasons’ for taking the crew. Except she called it ‘they,’ so --”

“There could be people in there,” Caitlin finished. She set down the otoscope and bit her lip thoughtfully. “Native life of some kind, at least, controlling the Other Place and its energy exchange with our dimension.”

Cisco surreptitiously glanced at Caitlin. He didn’t see any needle marks on her arms, and she didn’t _look_ like a person who’d just injected herself with an untested serum, but --

“I think you saw them, Cait,” he said tentatively, “when you were lost in the storm. They’re angry, you said.”

Caitlin reached for some other medical device, not looking at him. “I didn’t _see_ anything. That’s why I didn’t know what I was talking about. Felt them, maybe.”

“Well, that’s not nothing,” Cisco pressed on. “That could be, I don’t know. Useful.”

Caitlin glared at him then, because she knew exactly what he was doing. “Right,” she snapped, “nearly destroying the ship just so I can spout cryptic nonsense about how the Time Lords are _feeling_ is super --”

“Stop.” 

It was the first time Iris had spoken since arriving in the med bay. She had spent Cisco’s story in careworn silence, but now she was looking between him and Caitlin with determined hands on her hips. 

“Clearly there’s some ongoing argument here,” she continued, “that I’m not about to get in the middle of. But has it occurred to you, Cait, that if the Other Place has a mind of its own, it might have given you your powers for a reason?”

“ _Given_ us --” Cisco started to ask, but then he remembered a gentle graze, a deafening roar, a blast of energy from everywhere and nowhere. He pounded his fist into his palm. “The dark matter engine. _They_ started it.”

“And used it to give you your powers,” Iris said, a smile tugging the corners of her mouth at the realization spreading across Cisco’s face. “Just like they used it to take the crew.”

“Whoa,” Barry breathed. He was looking at Iris with a practically anime-level gleam in his eyes. “That’s --”

“What’s your point, Iris?” Caitlin said over him. “Why should I care what the space demons who trapped us on this ship think I should do with my powers?”

“Cisco’s powers helped him find the crew, not to mention breach us to Proxima a million times faster, you don’t think that’s something?”

Caitlin’s nostrils flared. “Oh, Cisco’s powers are obviously _fantastic_ , the fact that they’ve left him in a hospital bed with blood pouring out of his skull notwithstanding --”

“Well,” Cisco said weakly, “that wasn’t the Other Place, it was Somewhere Over the Rainbow --”

“Excuse me for being optimistic.” Iris’s mouth was set in a restrained line, but her eyes burned freely. “For hoping that maybe all this bullshit has a _purpose_.”

“There’s no purpose to what I do, I just freeze stuff and hurt people --”

“Oh my _God_ , Cait.” Iris reached over Cisco to grab Caitlin’s hand. “If you can feel what the crew and the Other Place are feeling, you might be able to help us _find_ them.”

Caitlin closed her mouth. There was a long moment where she did nothing but stare at Iris’s hand in hers. Then --

“I’m with Snow,” Harry said.

Cisco twisted his neck to look at Harry, who was holding his glasses in his hands and staring at them like he’d intended to clean them but got lost along the way.

“Harry, what --”

“I don’t think,” he continued, voice bristling with something almost like his usual frustration, “that we should be looking at this as some kind of divine intervention.”

“Hey,” Barry said, ready-to-fight face already squared away, “I think it’s pretty obvious that Iris is right about the Other Place giving us our powers.”

“I have no doubt that she is, Allen.” Harry put his glasses back on. “What I dispute is the idea that this plan the Other Place may or may not have is one that should be followed, and not _resisted_.”

Harry met Cisco’s gaze then. Cisco scrunched his mouth to the side and raised an eyebrow. _Jesse?_

Harry nodded. Cisco could see him chewing the inside of his cheek raw. “They took the crew. They took Jesse. And if that was part of their _plan_ , I don’t want to know what the rest of it entails.”

“But what if they want us to save the crew?” Iris stepped toward Harry, looking up into his face with sympathy and defiance. “What if that’s why they gave us --” her voice stumbled, and her mouth trembled for just a second before she pulled it steady again -- “ _them_ , gave Barry and Cisco and Caitlin their powers?”

“If the Other Place wanted to release the crew,” Harry retorted, voice rising to an exasperated pitch, “they could presumably do it themselves.”

“Unless the crew’s still in danger,” Cisco heard himself say.

Everyone turned to look at him. It was all Cisco could do not to roll his eyes at them.

“Sorry, I was just assuming that the Other Place took them to, you know, protect them from DeVoe’s dastardly plans.” Cisco glanced at Harry again, who nodded at him to continue. “So if it’s still keeping them there, it’s gotta be because it’s not safe for them.”

“Ramon.” Harry leaned over so their faces were level, and Cisco felt himself drawn gently toward him like there was a string tied to his chest. “Could you vibe them again? Or would it hurt you?”

“I don’t know,” Cisco said truthfully. “I still don’t know where the -- the bad vibe came from.”

Harry’s forehead creased in concern. “Don’t do it. Not if it’ll hurt you.”

_God,_ he loved --

“I’ll do it.” Cisco swallowed. “I will.”

He felt a hand on his shoulder. “Fine, but let’s wait till tomorrow,” Caitlin said. “I’ll monitor you, and keep you safe however I can.” Cisco put his hand over hers and tried to say _thank you_ with just his eyes and closed-up throat.

\---

Later that night, long after Harry had left to run simulations as if he could solve for Jesse like the variables in his equations, and long after Caitlin had passed out on a nearby cot and Barry had started snoring into Iris’s shoulder, Cisco let the thought that had been itching at the back of his head all evening free.

“Iris,” he whispered, “do you wish you had powers?”

She blinked up at him with dozing eyes. “I told you I didn’t, Cisco.”

“Then what was that earlier? When you slipped and said the Other Place gave _us_ our powers, and then looked all sad for a sec.”

Iris rubbed her fingers over her eyes. “You really are too smart, you know that?”

Cisco just waited. Eventually, Iris sighed and looked at the ceiling. 

“I guess it just occurred to me,” she said, “that if the Other Place gave you guys powers because they had these big cosmic plans… they didn’t have any plans for me.”

“That’s kind of a big leap,” Cisco murmured.

“Not really.” Iris ran her fingers over Barry’s scalp absentmindedly. “And I still don’t want powers, mind you. It just kind of hurt to realize that the, uh, Time Lords, even if they’re assholes, didn’t think I was worthy of them.”

“ _Or_ they knew you were already the biggest badass in the universe and didn’t need them.” Iris scoffed, but Cisco sat up a little higher against his pillows. “No, for real. What could they have given you to make you better than you are?”

Iris shrugged. “I don’t know, Cisco. But I do know that I’m not gonna be able to help save the crew when it comes down to it.”

“Alright, now that’s just the wrong-est thing you’ve ever said. You’re, like, the captain, Iris. None of us would be anywhere without you.” 

Iris didn’t look up, but her fingers stilled in Barry’s hair. “Maybe.”

“No, listen, think about it this way.” Cisco felt like he was writing his thesis at four in the morning, pulling ideas out of his ass but knowing, somehow, they’d make sense in the end. “Think about the four of us. We’re a set, we’re the four main components of the universe: I’m space, Barry is time, and Caitlin is energy. That makes you mass.”

Iris wrinkled her nose at him. “That sounds boring.”

“Okay, yes, but only when you don’t know physics.” Cisco made grabby hands at Iris, and she rolled her eyes but put her hand in his anyway. “Do you know what the strong force is? It’s the strongest force we know of.”

“Terrible name, then.”

“Oh, abysmal. But the strong force is what holds quarks together into protons and neutrons, and holds protons and neutrons together into atoms. It blows every other physical phenomenon out of the water. It’s ten to the _thirty-eighth_ times stronger than gravity. Nothing would exist without the strong force. Space would be empty, and time would be meaningless, and energy would be bouncing around with nothing to hold on to.”

Iris squeezed his hand, and finally looked like she was about to smile. “So I’m the strong force.”

“Yeah.” Cisco squeezed back. “The stuff that holds the universe together.”

\---

_It took me a long time to figure out how to see back into the universe. Took a lot of (ugh) meditating. “Reaching out with my feelings,” as Ramon would say. It was brain-meltingly boring for a while, but it’s not as if there was much else to do here. And I needed -- I needed to know. Where DeVoe had gotten to, whether he had hurt anyone else. Whether anyone had unlocked the hologram. Whether anyone was looking for us._

_I hadn’t expected to find that my esteemed colleagues had abandoned not only_ Providence _but the entire space program. I hadn’t expected to find DeVoe -- I mean, I thought they’d dealt with him. We all did. That was supposed to be the fucking point of all this._

_I definitely hadn’t expected to find Ramon and his merry band of grad students trying to break into my ship. I hate surprises. That one turned out to be the exception that proves the rule._

_One thing I’ve learned, from everything I’ve been able to see, is that this place may have a plan, but it’s gone entirely to shit. So Jesse and I have come up with our own plan, which I like a lot better._

_Step 1: Bully the Other Place into letting us go._

_Step 2: That’s it._

_I can’t fucking wait._

\---

The next morning, when he could walk with only a slight wobble in his knees, Cisco searched the med bay and found one of Hewitt the medic’s lab coats, which was crunchy with dust and age but still folded immaculately. He held it in his lap and tried to feel something while the others stood around his bed and watched. Cisco closed his eyes so he wouldn’t have to see their worried faces.

“Pretend I said something clever about performance anxiety,” he mumbled, right before he was yanked through the darkness and into a vision.

He knew immediately that he had not, in fact, managed to vibe the Other Place, because everything was languid blue instead of uncanny gold. He saw Hewitt, his breath ragged and his bald head shining with sweat as he ran on a zero-gravity treadmill. 

_No, no, this is wrong, take me deeper._

Cisco _pushed_ against the vision, tried to find those layers of the universe and the twisting filaments of dark matter that would take him past them. And it worked, everything went black and then blacker, and he opened his eyes and saw --

Hewitt again, still blue and slow, but this time strapped into his bunk in the _Providence_ living quarters. And even though his eyes were closed, there was an expression of anxious rapture on his face, like he was waiting for something extraordinary and unfathomable. Cisco looked around and saw that the rows and rows of bunks around him were also filled with passengers staring up at the ceiling and balling their hands in their sheets.

“ _Three_.” A deep voice boomed from the intercoms and ah, _of course_ , that’s what Hewitt was waiting for.

“ _Two._ ” The voice sounded vaguely familiar, which distracted Cisco just enough that he could forget what he was about to see --

“ _One._ ” 

And there was a blinding flash of light, and everyone was gone. Hewitt’s bed was empty, the harness laying limp and the sheets bearing just the faintest impression of the body that had been there.

_Damn it._

_Alright. That was closer. Give it a little more juice._

Deeper, and darker, and Cisco felt himself drifting again through the molasses-y boundaries between universes. He thought he was close, could feel the golden place just out of reach, knew that if he opened his eyes he would _be there_ \--

And then it happened again. Interference shattered through his nervous system, blinding him, threatening to tremble his molecules apart. Everything was black, and white, and blue and gold and Caitlin’s hands as she held him down through the spasms wracking his body --

And then the rainbow light again, hazy shifting spectrums in a red-dark sky. And a voice, that horribly vaguely familiar voice was whispering, booming in his ear.

_You’re resilient, aren’t you?_

Cisco gritted his teeth against the pain, tried not to slip back to the real world just yet. _Yeah, whoever-the-fuck. You don’t even know._

A wheezing chuckle. _That’s good. I’m going to need all the power you can give me._

_I’m not giving you shit._

_I wasn’t asking._

Vibrations, jagged and blistering, crackled through Cisco’s body again, and he felt the Other Place slip further away.

_No --_

_I’m sorry, Mr. Ramon. But I can’t let you keep visiting the Speed Force. If they see you, they might learn what I’ve done so far. And I can’t have that._

_The Speed Force? Is that seriously what you’re calling the Other Place? That name sucks. You suck._

Cisco felt a shadow fall heavy around him, like somewhere someone was drawing closer to spit their words right in his face.

_You won’t mock me_ , the voice said, _when I tell you of my plans. Then you will see, as I have, that the only option is enlightenment._

Cisco plunged back to the med bay, gasping for air. Caitlin released her pressure on his shoulders and grabbed a damp cloth to wipe down his face.

“You _can’t_ do that again,” she said, her voice hard with concern. “I can’t even begin to speculate what kind of damage it’s doing to your nervous system.” 

“Preaching to the choir, Cait.” Cisco looked around dazedly, past Barry and Iris just releasing their frantic grips on each other. “Harry.”

Harry gripped the side of the bed, looking like the sight of blood on Cisco’s face physically pained him. “Yes, Cisco?”

Cisco took a rattling breath. “Remind me,” he said, though he already knew the answer, “who did the countdown on Launch Day?”

Harry frowned. “DeVoe did.”

“Yeah, okay.” Cisco slumped back into his pillows and squeezed his eyes shut against the throbbing ache building in his head. “So, fun fact. DeVoe’s not dead. He’s Bad Vibe.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for reading! Your comments on the last chapter made my entire life and helped the midpoint of the story feel like a big fuckin' deal, which it was to me. I hope you'll all stick with me as I keep trudging up Plot Mountain toward Endgame Peak, and that you'll have as much fun getting there as I've had writing (though I had. just. so much writer's block and angst over this chapter, not gonna lie). 
> 
> Follow me on tumblr at she-is-the-doctor and yell at me about Harrisco. Two more followers and I'll hit 420 and have a good chuckle.


	10. The Pit of Man’s Fears

It took a lot of doing, but Cisco eventually managed to get Caitlin to train with him and Harry. What finally closed the deal was Cisco agreeing, under extreme duress, to keep a syringe of tranquilizer in his pocket during every session.

“If I start going all killer frost again, you can’t hesitate,” she had said, looking very serious in that way that stressed Cisco out. “You can’t let me get that close to destroying the ship again.”

“Killer Frost,” Cisco had laughed nervously. “Not a bad superhero name.”

“Cisco.”

“Alright, alright.” He had raised his hands in surrender. “If it makes you happy, I promise to no-scope you at the slightest provocation.”

Caitlin had laughed at that, real and full. “Thank you. And, for the record, I don’t want a superhero name. But I like Killer Frost better than _Frosty_ , if it ever comes down to it.”

So there they were in the mess hall, Caitlin in the middle of the floor again, Harry circling her again, and Cisco sitting off to the side with the goddamn tranq gun Harry had insisted they build together in his pocket.

(“You haven’t aligned the striker right, Ramon, you’ve got to --”

“I’ve aligned it perfectly, actually.”

“No, it’s going to catch on the side of the chamber, knocking your aim off by at least three degrees.”

“It’s aligned perfectly, Harry, which I would prove by tranqing you right now, if that wasn’t such an obvious waste of a dart.”

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you, to shut me up so you don’t have to listen to me telling you the _striker is off-center_ \--”

“Hey, Harry?” And Cisco had turned so their faces were just centimeters apart, heard Harry’s breath hitch, let his gaze easily and obviously drop down to Harry’s mouth. “Shut up.”

And Harry had.)

“Alright.” Caitlin shook out her limbs and let out a tersely controlled breath. “I’m ready.”

“Good. Close your eyes, Snow.”

Caitlin did. Harry paced wide loops around her, his starship captain demeanor back and definitely not making Cisco feel some type of way.

“I think we have to reframe our thinking about your powers,” Harry said. “We know now that your mind enters the Other Place along with the energy you’re siphoning. I think it’s safe to assume that the energy is following your mind, and not the other way around.”

“Okay,” Caitlin said slowly. “So, practical terms, Harry, what does that mean?”

“It means there’s a possibility that, if you focus on moving your mind instead of the heat, you’ll stay in your mind.” Cisco saw Harry smile, soft and infinitesimal. “You’ll stay in control.”

“Okay.” Caitlin squared her shoulders, standing straighter, maybe, than she had since Earth. “In my mind. In control.”

Ice crystals crept across Caitlin’s fingertips and the ends of her hair, but she didn’t seem to notice. Her breathing stayed even.

“Excellent, Snow,” Harry said. “Do you see anything?”

“Um.” Caitlin screwed her eyes up tighter. “It’s a layer removed, like it’s shining at me from behind my eyelids. But there’s a golden light? Maybe?”

“That’s the Other Place!” Cisco called, leaping off the table to land on his feet. “Keep going, Cait!”

Caitlin clenched her fists. The frost climbed further up her hair, and snow began to swirl around her -- but it was gentle eddies, a miniature vortex about an armspan wide. Not a storm, not a hurricane.

“You’re doing it,” Harry said, something like pride in his voice. “Stay focused.”

“Yeah.” Caitlin opened her hands, and freezing fog fell from her fingers to gather around her feet. “I can -- Harry, I think I --”

She opened her eyes. They were an icy gray.

“Whoa,” she said with an awestruck laugh. “That was easier than last time.”

“Caitlin!” Cisco wasn’t thinking, he was running toward her, he was reaching for the tranq gun to stop her before --

Caitlin blinked, right as he reached the edge of her snow flurry, and her eyes were brown again. She frowned at him in concern. “What, Cisco?”

“Your -- your eyes.” Cisco raked his gaze over her face, waiting for something to change, for everything to go wrong. “They were -- like in my vision.”

Caitlin’s eyes went wide, and the cold wind around her died down. “Oh.”

Cisco felt Harry’s light buzzing up behind him and turned. “Harry,” he said, “we have to stop training.”

“Cisco,” Caitlin exclaimed, “I _just_ did something cool, finally, and now --”

“Maybe the iris pigmentation isn’t strictly a bad thing, Ramon.” Harry stopped at Cisco’s side and hovered a hand over his shoulder. “Maybe it’s just a side effect of her alignment with the Other Place.”

Cisco tried to breathe around the pounding of his heartbeat in his ears. “But my vision -- she was so --”

“Hey.” Cisco felt a hand actually come to rest on his shoulder, and turned again to see Caitlin smiling at him. “I’m here. And not evil or anything.”

She wasn’t. She looked happier, really, than Cisco had seen her in a long time.

He nodded. “Alright. Can we take a break, though, at least?”

Harry sighed exasperatedly, but there was no bite to it. “Fine.”

Caitlin clapped her hands together. “Great. Let’s make space popcorn.”

\---

_Communing with the Other Place doesn’t require any kind of training montage, something I’m sure would disappoint Ramon immensely. Jesse and I don’t have to climb a time mountain or learn space karate or light candles around the NASA logo. The Other Place is all around us, after all, and they’ve spoken to us before. We just have to ask them._

_(Other members of the crew have called on them, I’ve heard. They take the face of people you love, and some people need that in here, even if it’s a lie. I’ve never summoned them myself. Because they do dead people too, I’ve heard, and I’m not interested._

_But twice, they’ve spoken to all of us. The first time was right after they stole us, and they put on the President’s face to tell us they were our saviors._

_“DeVoe has taken so much and hurt so many,” they said, “and would have done even worse if we had not stopped him. You are safe now, and so is your world. We will watch over you all.”_

_We all hated it, of course. Hated that keeping us locked in our little gilded cage outside of time and space was apparently the only solution. But we didn’t say that out loud, because we believed the Other Place when they said they knew what they were doing. And that they were watching._

_The second time was right after DeVoe got in. No matter how hard they tried, they couldn’t stop us from seeing when he shattered into the Other Place, a year to the day after_ Providence _was supposed to launch. We all watched as they broke him, and cast him back out._

_“You see,” they said to us, breathing a little too hard, Mr. Rogers’ face slipping a little because they’d put it on too hastily. “It is still not safe for you out there.”_

_They couldn’t stop us whispering to each other, after that.)_

_I meet Jesse in her room, which looks the same as ever even though Cisco has been there. She’s got that look on her face like she’s ready to fight the whole universe. She says I get the same look sometimes, that she got it from me. I think she got it from Tess, but I never argue with her._

_“You ready?” Jesse says, taking my hand._

_I nod, grateful as always that we can still touch each other, at least, in this nothing place. “Remember,” I say, “no matter whose face they take --”_

_“Don’t let it get to me.” She squeezes my hand. “I won’t, Dad.”_

_“Alright. Eyes closed, then.”_

_Jesse closes her eyes, and I only look at her almost-calm face for a second before closing mine, too._

_“Hey you,” I call out. “We need to talk.”_

_There’s no pop, no ding, no Windows ‘98 boot-up sound. We just open our eyes, and she’s there._

_They’re there, I mean._

_It’s Tess’s face. They’re wearing Tess’s face, the motherfuckers._

\---

“Oh hey, by the way,” Cisco crunched around a mouthful of cheesy popcorn, “what did you see in there, Caitlin?”

They were sitting cross-legged on the floor next to the viewing wall. Caitlin munched thoughtfully and stared at the stars. “Nothing much. I was in a field, I think. And way across the grass there was a house, a mansion practically --”

“Must be where Jesse’s room is,” Cisco said sagely. 

Harry’s head perked up. “We should try and get you into the house next time,” he said. “Speaking of, Snow, what did you mean when you said it was easier than last time?”

Caitlin frowned. “I think the Other Place felt closer. Like, last time there was a huge, solid barrier that I was getting dragged through, and that’s why I felt so far away once I was on the other side. But this time…” She shrugged and popped another handful of popcorn in her mouth. “I don’t know. It was easier.”

“Huh.” Cisco twisted a kernel in his fingers contemplatively. “Practice makes perfect, I guess?”

Harry frowned the way he did when he thought Cisco was wrong, but didn’t say anything. 

“Harry,” Caitlin said suddenly, “Can I ask you a question?”

Harry’s eyebrows flew up, like no one had ever asked him if they could ask him a question before. “Sure, Snow.”

“What’s Proxima Centauri B like?”

 _Right._ Cisco’s heart tightened with that weird combination of anticipation and dread that he felt whenever he thought about the alien planet he would actually, physically be standing on ( _living on_ ) in just a matter of days. It must have shown on his face, too, because Harry’s shoulder drifted closer to his. Almost touching.

“Huh. Well.” Harry cleared his throat. “We know very little for certain about Proxima B, of course. It’s mostly conjecture.”

Caitlin rested her chin on her hand and smiled at Harry. “So conject.”

“That’s not --” Harry shook his head and let out a dry chuckle. “Whatever. Okay. Proxima Centauri is a red dwarf, obviously, meaning it’s not particularly hot or bright. So Proxima B will be quite cold.”

“Cool,” Caitlin said drily. Cisco snorted.

“And we’re almost certain the planet is tidally locked with the star, so the only habitable land will be a strip between the eastern and western hemispheres.” Harry looked at Cisco, and something in his eyes made Cisco’s heart do a twistier backflip than usual. “But it will always be sunset, in that twilight zone.”

“Romantic,” Cisco heard himself say, like an idiot.

Caitlin cleared her throat, and Cisco and Harry both snapped their attention back to her. She looked so smug, it was practically indecent. “Is it seriously called the twilight zone, Harry?”

Harry adjusted his glasses like he desperately needed something to do with his hands. “Yes. Or the terminator line.”

Cisco grinned. “It doesn’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear?”

Harry looked back at him over the tops of his glasses. “And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you’re dead.” 

Caitlin rolled her eyes. “Can we focus, maybe? What else, Harry?”

“Let me see.” Harry licked his lips absentmindedly, and Cisco definitely didn’t black out for a second. “The star expels massive amounts of solar wind. The planet’s atmosphere is substantial enough to shield the surface from the radiation, obviously. But it means there will always be auroras in the sky.”

Cisco blinked. Something worrying tugged at the edges of his Harry thoughts. “Like the Northern Lights?”

“Brilliant deduction, Ramon.”

“No, like --” Cisco scrambled onto his knees, suddenly filled with the sense that he needed to be ready to run for his life. “The air will always be full of rainbows? And it’ll be cold and the sky will be red and dark?”

Caitlin was looking at him like he’d lost his mind, but Harry -- something was dawning behind Harry’s eyes, Cisco saw it. He knew ( _loved_ ) that look so well, but it was horrible to watch this time, because it was a horrible thing to know --

“DeVoe,” Harry whispered. “He’s on Proxima B.”

\---

_I can hear Jesse’s breath catch in her throat. I assume mine has, too, because I’m not exactly breathing._

_“You wish to speak with us, Dr. Wells?” they say with Tess’s voice._

_My breath returns, diluted with a fury that pitches my voice low like it’s sulfur hexafluoride. “No,” I manage to grit out. “You don’t get to have her face, you cowards.”_

_They step closer, and it takes everything I have not to tug Jesse back and out the goddamn window. “Is there another you would prefer? Anyone else you’ve grown to care for?”_

_I think of Cisco, of course. And then I stop thinking of Cisco, because I’m sure they can read my mind, and if the first time I saw his face in front of me was because my depraved space warden was wearing it, I might actually fight the whole universe._

_“No,” I say. I can tell they know I’m lying, because Tess had a face she made when she knew I was lying. But they don’t change, which is, I guess, a good thing. Gather ye rosebuds while ye fucking may._

_“Very well.” They shake Tess’s hair out of Tess’s face. It catches the golden light of this place and I feel my heart drop into my knees. “Say what you need to, then.”_

_Jesse, possibly sensing how pitifully compromised I am, clears her throat. “We need you to let us go,” she says, and her voice only trembles a little._

_“You know we cannot do that.” They fix Jesse with a look that’s too stern, too patronizing for Tess, which helps nudge me out of my stupor. “It is not --”_

_“Not safe, yeah, you’ve said.” Jesse lets go of my hand to cross her arms aggressively at the Other Place. I’m so proud of her. “But the people headed for Proxima Centauri B, the ones that_ you _gave abilities to even though I thought that was supposed to be a big no-no, are on their way to save us. And they don’t know what kind of danger they’re about to run into.”_

_The Other Place narrows Tess’s eyes at Jesse. Which is how I learn that interdimensional time gods can still have terrible poker faces. “What danger do you speak of?”_

_“DeVoe.” I’ve remembered how to speak again, just in time to drop the absolute kicker I’ve been holding onto. “You said he’d been taken care of. So you’ll imagine my surprise when I saw him alive and still jackassing around on Proxima Centauri B.”_

_Tess’s face rearranges. Her eyes go hard as steel, her mouth twists into a vicious snarl, and I instinctually fling my arm out in front of Jesse. Not because I think the thing will attack her, but because she shouldn’t have to see the mask of her mother’s face like this. I shouldn’t, either, but that’s not important._

_“How do you know this?” the Other Place hisses through Tess’s teeth._

_I square my jaw. “You’re not the only ones who can see everything.”_

_They look absolutely wild with rage and panic, and I swear to God the air grows thick with static electricity. I feel them, I think, probing around in my mind, trying to dig out what else I’ve done, what else I’ve seen. That’s unacceptable._

_“You fucked up, didn’t you?” I continue, hoping to distract them. “You meant to destroy DeVoe, but you didn’t. You just made him more of a threat.”_

_“You cannot comprehend our plans, no matter how omniscient you think you have become.” Tess’s voice is practically a whisper. Maybe they think it sounds threatening, but it just sounds scared._

_I laugh, short and devoid of humor. “No, you’re right, I can’t. Because you don’t actually know what you’re doing.”_

_They get right up in my face, which is something Tess used to do sometimes. But Tess never bristled with inhuman anger like this, hair on end and hands curled into claws. And where she smelled like vanilla and pine trees, this thing smells like copper wires sizzling with a too-strong current, so it’s not as hard to stand my ground as I thought it would be._

_“DeVoe will be taken care of,” they spit at me. “So you would do best to abandon your crusade.”_

_“How?” I ask, because I honestly want to know. “Who’s going to do it?”_

_Tess’s eyes flicker to Jesse. “You already know the answer.”_

_Christ. I realize what they mean, just as --_

_“Oh.” Jesse shudders out the word, taking none of her usual joy in having solved the puzzle. “The people on the ship.”_

_The Other Place nods, regal and infuriating. “We bestowed their abilities upon them and set them on their current course so that they may defeat DeVoe.”_

_I feel something in my brain short-circuit. “You -- you’re going to sic them on DeVoe like trained dogs.”_

_They turn their arrogant glare back on me. “Nothing so crude as that, Dr. Wells. Their abilities are precisely calibrated to make them collectively a perfect match for DeVoe.”_

_“Bullshit. He’s already hurting Ramon, even from a lightyear away.”_

_Tess’s mouth smiles at me, incandescent and horrifying. “The one called Cisco Ramon is the key. If the pain makes him stronger, so be it.”_

_It’s Jesse’s turn to hold me back. It’s probably for the best, because who knows what would happen if I clocked the Other Place in the jaw like I so, so desperately want to. I struggle against her grip, though, just to make it clear that I would if I could._

_“Fuck you,” I snarl in Tess’s face. “Let us go. Let us help him.”_

_“We cannot.”_

_“Why?” Jesse shouts at them. “If DeVoe is the danger you’re protecting us from, why can’t you let us protect ourselves?”_

_The Other Place deflates, just a bit, which surprises me into stillness. They bite Tess’s lip in a way that looks almost worried._

_“DeVoe,” they say softly, “has not been wasting away these nineteen years. Quietly, in ways you cannot understand, he has been working. Chipping away at us. If we free you, he will break through. That is why you must remain.”_

_I feel my breath heavy in my lungs, ready to seize up and run away from me again. “DeVoe is trying to get back in here?”_

_“No.” They look at me, and Tess’s eyes are almost pleading. “This time, he plans to do much worse.”_

\---

Harry had a rock in his lab that a probe had taken from Proxima B decades ago, and he led Cisco to it like it was the last thing in the universe he wanted to do. It felt like any other rock, when Cisco held it in his hands. No one would have suspected that it had traversed the galaxy, or that it was about to confirm exactly how fucked they were.

Caitlin hovered behind him, medical supplies at the ready. Harry chewed the knuckle of his thumb as he watched Cisco close his hands around the stone. Cisco wondered how many times he, at this point, had made Harry watch as he leapt into the ravenous mouth of the multiverse. Too many, he thought. But there was nothing else for it.

Cisco closed his eyes, and opened them on Proxima B. 

It was the place from the bad vibes, he knew that immediately. Even through the blue haze, he could see dry snow drifting across a sky lit up with auroras that shimmered in every color of the rainbow. He was standing on a mountain, icy and craggled, and he turned and saw its peak stretching above him and the valley below, saw the tiny red sun setting over the mountain range, and he kept turning and saw --

a man who had been tall, once. He was hunched now, limping away from Cisco over the rocky, slanting ground. His hair was gray, and curly. Cisco followed him, even though it was the last thing in the universe he wanted to do. He kept a healthy distance.

The man led him to an outcropping that turned out to be the wide, oddly circular mouth of a cave. The walls were smooth and mossy ( _life. there was life here_ ), and the floor tilted down as Cisco and the man walked, taking them deep under the mountain.

The tunnel grew wider as they went, and Cisco could tell it must be warmer down here, because the moss was growing thicker. In fact, right as the last light from the surface faded out, the moss began to blink with its own bioluminescence. Softly, then brighter. Blues and purples and greens, all around the walls and ceiling of the tunnel, each patch of moss glowing with a light that pulsed like a little heartbeat. 

Cisco couldn’t help it. He gasped.

The man stopped. Half turned like he was listening, like he was sniffing the air. Cisco froze, even though this was a vibe, he wasn’t really here, he couldn’t be seen or heard or smelled --

But that rule had been broken before.

Cisco crept backwards on the tips of his toes, willing the vibe to be over, trying to feel his way back to the world and the stone and Harry --

A horrible smile crept across DeVoe’s face. Speaking of broken.

“I must admit, I didn’t think you would figure it out.” DeVoe turned fully toward him, casting his eyes around the tunnel -- he couldn’t see Cisco, then, just sense his presence somehow. Great. “But you are cleverer than, perhaps, I have given you credit for. Bravo.”

Cisco’s insides twisted with the urge to spit insults back in DeVoe’s face, but he just kept fumbling backward through the tunnel, through the universe.

“How does it feel, Mr. Ramon?” DeVoe’s voice was older, rougher, more unstable than it had been twenty years ago, but it dripped with the same slimy disdain. “To know that you cannot escape me no matter how hard you try?”

DeVoe reached out a hand like he thought he could grab Cisco by the hair. And Cisco was already yards and yards away and getting farther, and he knew DeVoe couldn’t touch him, and he knew he could take an old man in a fight anyway, but he also knew that he really, really didn’t want DeVoe to close that hand.

DeVoe laughed. It was awful. “You should trust your instincts, Mr. Ramon.”

And he closed his hand, and Cisco’s mind shattered. Again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading! This one was such a blast to write (turns out I really like writing scary shit I guess??). As always, comments will make me love you forever, and you can follow me on Tumblr at she-is-the-doctor, where I'm slowly turning into a Harrisco blog.


	11. Friends Don't Lie

Cisco woke up in the med bay feeling like his head had been pressed through a pasta machine and boiled to a nice _al dente_. But the first thing he saw was Harry, sitting in the chair next to his bed and watching him with tired eyes, so it wasn’t all bad.

“Ramon. Cisco.” Harry sprang to his feet as soon as Cisco blearily opened his eyes. “Are you -- are you alright? Do you need anything, should I get Snow --”

“M’fine, Harry,” Cisco mumbled, even though he wasn’t, not really. Anything to get the gasping panic out from between Harry’s words. “My head just hurts.”

Harry leaned down a bit and reached out like he was going to touch Cisco’s face. But, unlike every other time before, he didn’t draw back, just let his fingers hover like Cisco was a butterfly, or a moonbeam, and would flutter away if spooked. 

And Cisco almost forgot himself, almost leaned into Harry’s not-touch. But then he remembered, and stopped himself. And he remembered other things, too, like what had gotten him into this bed, and what was waiting, and what he had to do.

“Where are the others?”

Harry dropped his hand, and Cisco could practically hear it when his jaw clenched tight. “Off working out a plan to defeat DeVoe.”

“I should go help them.”

 _“No._ ” The force with which Harry said the word was enough to push Cisco back against his pillows. “You need to rest. And also have as little to do with DeVoe as possible.”

Cisco crossed his arms. “What, so you want me to let my friends face down the final boss by themselves? No chance, dude.”

“What I _want_ is for you to take your own safety into account, for once.” Harry’s voice was all rough edges, kind of scary and kind of hot and _very_ unfair. “You promised you wouldn’t vibe DeVoe again, and yet here we are.”

“What else was I supposed to do? You know I didn’t have a choice.”

“There’s always a choice.”

“Says you.”

“Yeah, says me.” Harry gripped the headboard and leaned closer, close and intense enough to whip Cisco’s blood up to fever speed. “What happens when we get to Proxima B? What happens when there’s not a lightyear of space between you and DeVoe?” 

Cisco swallowed. “I don’t know.”

“But you do. He said he would take everything from you. Use you up for whatever his fucking _enlightenment_ is. And the closer we get to Proxima, the closer DeVoe will get to making good on his promise.”

Cisco turned in the bed to properly face Harry, tucking his knees under himself so their faces were level and Harry’s blue, blue eyes were glaring right into his. “What’s your point, Harry? You gonna turn the ship around?” 

“Maybe.”

“We can’t do that! That was the first thing you ever said to me, that we can’t do that.”

“Not right now, maybe. But when we enter Proxima B’s orbit, we could swing around, instead of landing, and go back to Earth. You could breach us there in a matter of weeks.”

“Are you serious right now?” Cisco tucked his sweaty hair back behind his ears and stood up a little higher on his knees. “We can’t just let DeVoe do whatever he’s gonna do.”

Harry scoffed. “See, we don’t even know what he’s planning.”

Cisco threw his arms in the air. “Yeah, but it’s gonna be, like, super _bad_ , Harry! I know that, and you know that, and if we let him get what he wants that’ll be on us for the rest of --”

“I can’t keep watching you _break apart, Cisco!_ ”

Harry shouted it like the words were being dragged from his throat. Cisco went quiet.

“I can’t watch him hurt you. I promised --” Harry hung his head, pounded his fist into the headboard soundlessly. “I promised I wouldn’t let him hurt you. And look how useless at that I turned out to be.”

“Hey.” Cisco raised his hand up to Harry’s chin, just close enough to make Harry look up at him. “Don’t say that, okay? You are the opposite of useless.”

Harry shook his head, minute and despairing. “I couldn’t save a mug if it was falling off a table, Cisco, let alone save you, or Jesse, or anyone else. I was built to dispense my memories, and I’ve done that, so what am I? What am I _for?_ ”

Cisco brought his other hand up to frame Harry’s face, his fingertips just atoms away from dipping into Harry’s light, and leaned in closer. If he listened really hard, he could almost imagine that the buzzing of Harry’s photons was a heartbeat.

“You’re not _for_ anything, Harry,” he whispered. “You just _are._ ”

Harry’s gaze fell down, maybe to Cisco’s mouth. “I’m not, though.”

“Yes, you are. And you’re gonna help us kick DeVoe’s ass, and you’re gonna help us get your daughter back and save the _Providence_ crew --”

Harry stepped back, and Cisco almost lost his balance, almost like he’d actually been holding Harry tight. There were a million emotions working their way through Harry’s face, it looked like, and none of them were good.

“The crew,” he whispered.

“Um, yeah?” Cisco fell back on his heels. “The crew that we’ve been trying to save from the interdimensional Upside-Down, that crew? Jesse’s there, as well as two hundred and three others, in case you --”

Harry cut Cisco off with a wet, terrified, furious look. _Oh. The others._

_The other, that is._

“Hey,” Cisco said, hopping down from the bed and only swaying on his feet a little bit, “I told you, I don’t -- I’m not thinking about him.”

Harry clenched his fists. “I don’t believe you.”

“What -- well I’m not, and short of strapping some kind of mind-reading device onto my forehead I don’t know how you expect me to prove that --”

“But why wouldn’t you, Cisco?” Harry shoved a hand through his hair, looking around the room frantically, desperately. “He’s me, and he’s _real_ , and that’s -- that’s everything you want, right?”

Cisco tried to ignore how much he felt like his lungs had just been punched out of his body. “Why _wouldn’t_ I?”

 _Because he doesn’t know me,_ he could have said.

 _Because every moment I’ve spent with you has been lightning in a bottle_ , he could have said, _and you know what they say about lightning striking twice._

 _Because I don’t think I could stand to be around a version of you that doesn’t love me back,_ he could have said. _Because I think that would actually end me._

“Because _you’re_ everything I want, Harry,” he said instead. It didn't escape him that it was the first time he'd said it out loud, with words and not with looks or innuendo or circling each other like comets caught in an endless orbit. It should have felt big. It just felt hopeless.

Harry squeezed his eyes shut and inhaled. “Don’t lie to me, Ramon,” he said, and walked out of the door.

\---

_Fuck._

_This isn’t --_

_What am I supposed to do if -- if he doesn’t --_

\---

Cisco went to the mess hall fully intending to help the others with their plan. Really. But apparently something of what had just happened still showed on his face, because when he walked in Caitlin gasped and called out, “What’s wrong, Cisco?”

And Iris and Barry turned and saw whatever his stupid face was doing, and the deep concern in their eyes was too, too much. So Cisco started crying, which was not at all what he had intended to do. Really.

They’d all wrapped him up in a tangled, sweaty group hug before he really knew what was happening. There was a lot of Cisco sniffling into Barry’s jacket and Iris petting Cisco’s hair and Caitlin cooing comforting nonsense, and then Barry had somehow gotten him into a chair. And the rest of them were sitting around the table looking at him, worried and expectant. 

For a few ticks of the atoms under his hands, Cisco considered lying. But his head hurt, and his heart hurt, and they were hurtling through space toward a freezing planet (Population: One brain-shredding madman) and these people were all he had in the universe right now. And, really, who had the energy?

So Cisco took a deep breath, because everything was about to change, and it seemed the thing to do. “I think,” he said, staring very carefully at his hands on the edge of the table, “that I’m in love with Harry.”

Iris snorted. 

Caitlin let her head drop forward onto the table with a _clonk_.

Barry’s eyes, though, went wide. “ _What?_ ” he practically shouted, and Iris and Caitlin burst out laughing.

“Babe, for real?” Iris cackled. “Sorry, Cisco, I don’t mean to -- but Barry, _Jesus_ , how could you not --”

Cisco covered his burning face in his hands. “God, was it really that obvious?”

He felt Iris’s hand on his arm and reluctantly peeked through his fingers at her. “Yes,” she said seriously, though her eyes were still smiling. “Cisco, you two are so far gone for each other I didn’t realize it was supposed to be some big secret.”

“Okay but, but wait, back up,” Barry stammered. He chewed his lip confusedly at Cisco, which was soothing in its familiarity, at least. “You -- you’re in love with Harry, which, cool, not gonna, like, hate on that even though it’s, um, interesting, but like -- how am I the only one who didn’t know?”

“Honey, you didn’t realize that Professor Singh and Coach Rob were married until you literally crashed into them making out in the library.”

“Hey, that was a very different situation --”

“I think the important question is,” Caitlin said over Barry, “what happened, Cisco?” She took his hand, and Cisco wanted to cry all over again. “Did you and Harry have a fight or something?”

Cisco wiped his face on his other sleeve and nodded. “He, uh. He’s really upset about being… incorporeal.”

Barry wrinkled his nose the way he did when a conversation he was not equipped to have was flying toward his face like a dodgeball. “Because you guys can’t, um -- you know --”

“Oh my God. No. Oh my _God_.” The other three all raised their eyebrows at him in unison, so Cisco plopped his head onto the table, which had looked so satisfying when Caitlin had done it. It just made his head hurt worse. “I mean, _ugh, maybe_. But there’s also a lot of other. _Stuff_.”

“I’m sure there is.” Cisco felt Iris’s hand on his back, rubbing little circles. “What are you gonna do about it?”

Cisco twisted his neck to look up at her. “What is there _to_ do, Iris? Other than suck it up and get over the most ill-advised crush in history?”

Iris smiled at him like he was being very, very dense and she loved him very, very much. “I’m not gonna tell you to stop loving him, Cisco. Not when it’s been obvious from the moment you two met that you just… fit.”

“She’s right,” Barry said. “I didn’t get what it meant, but you guys, when you’re around each other -- I don’t know. It’s like you couldn’t imagine being anywhere else. And that has nothing to do with how corporeal Harry may or may not be.” 

And Barry smiled at Iris, wide and soft and devastating, and Cisco felt his heart go _Oh. Yeah._

\---

_The Other Place was right, about DeVoe chipping away. The boundary feels thinner, weaker, more pliable. Like I could break through if I pushed in just the right spot._

_Or Ramon could, if I showed him where._

_But I don’t want to -- I need to focus. Figure out a plan. Stop thinking about him, for now._

\---

The lights in Harry’s lab were that viscous nighttime orange. Winding his way through the shadowy corridors of junk, Cisco found himself tiptoeing, even though there was no reason to. Maybe it was to compensate for the definitely-audible pounding of his heart. Maybe it was because he felt ready to vibrate off the floor and out toward the stars.

He arrived in front of the door he’d been looking for, and stopped. “Harry?” he whispered.

Nothing, for a breath. Then a _pop_ , and Harry was there, leaning against the door and not looking at him.

“Harry,” Cisco said again, and it sounded like _please_.

Harry ran a hand through his hair again, and Cisco felt his whole body thrum like a plucked guitar string. “Cisco, I --” Harry swallowed. His whole throat tightened with the movement. “I’m sorry, Cisco. But I can’t.”

Cisco took a small step closer, close enough that he would have been able to smell Harry if he’d had a smell, close enough to feel Harry’s body heat if he’d had a body. “Can’t what?”

“You know what I mean.” Harry looked down at his feet, and still not at Cisco. “I can’t be what you need me to be.”

“I don’t need you to be anything.”

Harry laughed, and closed his eyes like it hurt from the inside out. Cisco wanted, needed, was going to explode if he couldn’t wrap his arms around Harry, pull him close, and kiss his hair until neither of them remembered what they’d been crying about.

He wanted, he needed. But there were other things to want.

“Harry,” Cisco murmured, “come to bed with me.”

Harry looked at him then, with such a sudden flare of fear and shock and hope in his eyes that Cisco was surprised to find himself unburned. “What -- what do you --”

“I mean I’m going to lie down in your bed, and you’re going to lie down next to me. And we’ll be close to each other, and we’ll spend the night together, and that’ll be enough.”

It sounded true, when Cisco said it. It almost felt true, too.

They settled into the bed in the captain’s quarters -- facing each other, hands almost touching, breathing the same air, kind of, if Cisco didn’t think about it too hard. Harry seemed stiff at first, scared to move, scared to disturb the equilibrium, but then Cisco shuffled even closer until their noses were dangerously close to brushing. And Harry gasped against Cisco’s mouth, and his long fingers curled near Cisco’s collarbone, and Cisco felt the spark of it tremble all the way through him.

“See, this is perfect,” he murmured, “because I get all the good blankets to myself.”

Harry laughed through his nose, tiny and ecstatic. “I love you, too.”

They stayed like that, breathing together, their lips just photons apart, until Cisco’s eyes started to flicker closed. He was tired. He ached all over, from the bad vibe and from wanting. But he didn’t want to sleep, didn’t want his body to forget that Harry was there. 

“It wasn’t because you were the first,” Harry whispered.

Cisco opened his eyes, glad of the distraction. “What?”

“When you unlocked my memories. It wasn’t because you were the first one I talked to.” Harry licked his lips, and Cisco shivered. “I think it was because I knew -- from the beginning, I knew that you were. Good. And you make everything around you good, too.”

Cisco squeezed his eyes shut again, just for a moment, so he wouldn’t do something stupid like try to kiss Harry’s brains out. “No way you could tell that after knowing me for, what, five minutes --”

“I did.” Harry’s voice was all roughness, all softness. “It was --”

“Love at first sight?” Cisco was certain that if he smiled his happiness would be too bright, too blinding, but he did it anyway. “Gross.”

Harry gave Cisco as exasperated of a look as he could with their foreheads practically touching, and didn’t deny it.

\---

_“Dad, are you okay?” Jesse asks me, after who knows how long._

_No, I could say. No, because I thought I would never see your mother’s face again, and when I did it was because a monster had put it on to threaten me, and you, and the man I love._

_No, I could say, because Cisco is in love with the hologram, the one that I was an idiot and gave my face to, and my mind, and my weakness for people who shine like the sun. So when -- if -- I meet him, he’s not going to want me. Because he already has me._

_No, I could say. Because still, despite everything, all I want to do is help him. And I don’t know if I can._

_“I’m fine,” I say instead. “Let me get back to work.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope y'all enjoyed this one ;)  
> The next chapter is going to be, and I do not use this term lightly, an absolute doozy. So if it takes a little longer to write, bear with me, but I promise it'll be up soon! As ever, thank you so much for reading and for your lovely comments <3


	12. The Dark Side Looks Back

“Alright everybody, listen to my goddamn girlfriend.”

“Thanks, babe.” Iris flashed Barry a brilliant smile and snapped open the extendable pointer she’d unearthed from somewhere in Harry’s lab. “Now that we’ve officially begun our deceleration in preparation for arrival in the Proxima system, let’s go over the plan. Please hold your questions until after the presentation.”

Cisco turned to Harry, who was sitting next to him on the workbench, and grinned. “Hear that?” he said softly.

The muscles in Harry’s jaw were already working overtime, but he shot Cisco a fond look anyway. “Shut up, Ramon. I think I can control myself.”

Iris rapped the whiteboard with her pointer, and Cisco jumped back to attention. “Step One,” she said, indicating the first item of the extensive list she’d written in purple marker, “Cisco makes the last jump to Proxima B.”

(The med bay beds did EEGs all by themselves, which had freed up Caitlin’s hands for her to wring skittishly while she scanned Cisco’s brain.

“Just what I thought,” she’d said once the bed beeped. “The electrical activity in your brain is growing more erratic.”

Cisco sat up and rubbed his temples. “Meaning what, exactly?”

“Meaning you’re more in danger of another seizure every day. I think Harry was right, I think DeVoe’s influence is getting stronger the closer we get to Proxima B.”

“Of course,” Cisco had muttered as he pressed his thumbs against his eyes. “Harry’s gonna be even more insufferable.”

“He just wants you to stay safe.” He’d been able to hear the sad little smile in Caitlin’s voice, even without looking at her. “We all do.”

“I know.”

“Do you?” she’d said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “I can’t speak for everyone, I mean. But Cisco, none of this -- stopping DeVoe, saving the crew, getting back home -- none of it’s worth anything to me if we lose you.”

“Don’t you think that’s a little shortsighted of you, Dr. Snow?”

“Maybe. But I really couldn’t care less.”)

“Step Two.” _Thwack._ “While Harry and I navigate the ship into orbit around the planet, Cisco breaches Barry and Caitlin down to the surface.”

“Won’t opening a breach that close to DeVoe expose Cisco to --”

“ _Up_ -bup-bup.” Cisco cut Harry off with a finger almost against his lips, and Harry went quiet and a little bit cross-eyed. “Listen to the lady, Mr. I-Can-Control-Myself.”

Iris swung the pointer in Harry’s direction. “Down to the surface a good distance away from DeVoe, that is,” she amended, “and then Barry will run them both to the cave.”

Harry nodded, then flashed Cisco a look that went right to Cisco’s dick, the bastard. Cisco lowered his finger.

_Thwack_. “Step Three. Barry and Caitlin subdue DeVoe.” 

(Cisco hadn’t seen Barry sweat since they’d gotten their powers. He’d been practically dripping, though, the day he’d gotten his top speed up to Mach 2.

“Dude,” Cisco had laughed incredulously as he clapped Barry on the back, “DeVoe literally won’t know what hit him.”

Barry had frowned at him, still breathing heavy. “Hit him.”

“Uh, yeah, I don’t think you’re taking down this clown without at least a bit of a scuffle, Barry.”

“Right, no, yeah.” Barry had sighed the world’s tiniest sigh. “But, I guess I’ve been thinking... what if we can’t restrain him? Are we gonna have to kill him?”

Cisco’s stomach plummeted, through the floor and out into the universe. “I don’t know,” he’d said hoarsely, his throat suddenly strangled under the implications. “I hope you don’t have to.”

“Yeah.” The stars from the viewing wall reflected blankly in Barry’s eyes. “Me too.”)

_Thwack_. “Step Four! Caitlin injects DeVoe with the cure, and Cisco breaches him into one of the escape pods for confinement.”

(“So.” Iris had held up the syringe and peered at the colorless liquid inside. “This is it. The cure.”

“Yup. Reverse engineered from the serum in Jesse’s suit, with Harry’s help.” Caitlin had met Cisco’s eyes, and almost smiled. “One dose. Tailor-made for DeVoe.”

Concern faintly creased Iris’s forehead. She seemed unable to look away from the syringe. “Guys,” she said softly, “what if this doesn’t work?”

“We triple-tested the serum, West. The prokaryotic enzyme is perfectly engineered to splice the modified DNA out of DeVoe’s --” Harry had stopped talking at the _put that thing back where it came from or so help me_ look Cisco had flashed him. He cleared his throat and pushed up his glasses. “Oh, you mean the whole -- everything. I mean. It -- it will work, West. It will work because you’re not going to accept anything less.”

Iris had smiled at Harry then. And when her shining eyes found Cisco, he’d mouthed “ _Strong force_ ” at her, and she’d pressed her hand to her heart.)

Iris landed the pointer on her palm with a last _smack_. “Last, but certainly not least, we turn this ship around using our momentum from Proxima B’s orbit, and we head back to Earth so fast our brains go into our feet.”

Cisco’s mouth fell open. “Iris Ann West. Was that a _Spaceballs_ reference?”

Iris winked at him. “Hold your questions.”

(“Harry.”

“Hm.” Harry hadn’t looked away from the whiteboard that Cisco had been covering with orbital trajectory equations.

Cisco had swallowed, and rubbed the heel of his hand over a square root he’d calculated wrong. “What happens when we get back to Earth?”

He’d felt Harry’s gaze burning into the side of his head. “We start working to free Jesse and the crew from the Other Place, obviously,” Harry had said warily.

“No, I mean --” Cisco kept scrubbing, _stupid board stupid marker_ \-- “I mean, like, with you. And me. And, you know, you and me _._ ” 

“Ramon.” Harry had stepped closer, and Cisco had put the marker down like it burned. “Are you _trying_ to generate new and exciting sources of angst?”

“No.”

“Really? Because I, quite sensibly as I’m sure you’ll agree, had placed _that_ bridge firmly in the ‘to cross when we come to it’ category. Because Earth is very far away, you see.”

“Har har.” Cisco had turned to face Harry. Looked up into that beautiful face that was always one wrong move from flickering away. “Must be nice, to be so clear-headed.”

“Fear leads to suffering, you know.”

“Don’t you _dare_ paraphrase Yoda at me.”

Harry had smiled like he couldn’t help it, or didn’t want to. And he pulled out the move that he’d been perfecting over the last few days, that still turned Cisco’s spine to jelly: he put his hand to Cisco’s face, just enough particles of contact so that, instead of disappearing, his fingertips buzzed with a staticky light. 

“Cisco,” he’d murmured, “I’m not going anywhere. If that’s what you’re asking.”)

\---

_“Dad,” Jesse says to me at last, “I don’t think you can break through by yourself.”_

_“Maybe. But I can keep trying.”_

_She sits next to me on the floor of my stupid, empty room that looks looks the same as hers, and every other room in this stupid, empty place. “I think we both know that Cisco has to be the one to do it.”_

_I sigh, and the strands of the multiverse I’d been coiling around my mind fall away. “There has to be another way.”_

_She narrows her eyes at me. “Why are you convincing yourself you’ve lost him before you two even meet?”_

_I choke on my own saliva, like an idiot. “What?” I splutter. “What do you --”_

_“God, Dad, you’re exhausting.” Jesse pats my hand tenderly and stands up. “I can feel how much you care about him, like, in the air, and I don’t even have psychic powers. So there’s no way Cisco won’t feel it, too.”_

_As I watch her walk out the door, her words churn around in my head._

_And all at once, I know what I have to do._

\---

“Alright, Cisco, get in position.”

“Ay-ay, Captain.” Cisco stood in front of the flight deck window, stance wide and knees bent. He closed his eyes and listened to the space in front of them. Even a vacuum had a feeling-sound, he’d learned, a shimmering undercurrent of loose photons and dark energy.

“Harry, what’s our velocity?” Iris continued. It seemed absurd that anyone but Iris had ever sat in the captain’s chair, so much so that Harry hadn’t even argued a little bit when she’d gestured him into the co-pilot’s seat.

“Twenty thousand kilometers per second and dropping fast,” Harry answered. “We’ll reach our target orbital speed in twenty-three seconds.”

Cisco spread his hands, started wrapping the threads of the universe around his fingers. “Ready.”

“Barry, Caitlin, be ready to breach as soon as we enter orbit,” Iris called. Cisco felt it, rather than saw it, as the two of them straightened up, hiding their pounding hearts under squared shoulders. “Cisco, ten seconds to jump -- nine -- eight --”

Cisco glanced back at the console, even though he knew it would break his concentration. Harry’s eyes were half elsewhere, scanning through the numbers and simulated trajectories deep inside his mind, but he still smiled, just a bit, when Cisco looked at him. And he nodded at the window, at the sparkling nothing in front of them, and Cisco turned back, satisfied, and plunged back into the fabric of it.

“-- two -- _one._ ”

Cisco _ripped_ , and space yawned open to swallow _Providence_ in its swirling blue mouth. It was a current rushing around them, flowing bright and impossibly fast, and Cisco felt small and enormous and tired and unstoppable as he held the edges of everything apart --

And then they were there, and for the first time since Earth there was something in the window.

Cisco practically collapsed against the glass, his legs and breath shaking, and stared. Barry and Caitlin crowded in around him, even though they were supposed to be in ready positions, but Iris didn’t say a thing because she was getting up to look, too. Proxima B hung in front of them, all of it still easily visible in the window, its surface craggled gray and white under a vibrant, ever-shifting blanket of auroras. And there, in the distance but nowhere near as far away as Cisco had expected, was Proxima Centauri, raging red and tiny in the ink-black sky.

“We’re in another solar system, guys,” Cisco murmured, in case saying it helped him believe it.

“You’re the first humans to lay eyes on an exoplanet.” Harry had come up behind him soundlessly, and Cisco’s would have shivered at his voice in his ear if the sight of Proxima hadn’t already prickled his skin into goosebumps. 

“DeVoe doesn’t count?” he whispered back.

Harry snorted. “No. I’ll make sure he doesn’t, if I have to write the history books myself.”

Cisco’s love-stupid smile was interrupted by Iris clapping her hands together. “Alright, gang,” she said. “For real, this time.”

As Harry and Iris took their seats again, Barry and Caitlin faced Cisco, gripping each other’s hands. Cisco squared his feet again, hoping the wobbling in his knees wasn’t as obvious as it felt, and watched the planet rise up to fill their range of view. He could pick out wispy clouds now, the wrinkled lines of mountain ranges, and he pictured the cave where DeVoe was hiding, with the valley below and the impossibly high peak above. He felt around for miles, reaching for a soft place to put his friends. 

“Alright,” he said, landing his mind’s eye in a snowbank by a frozen sea, “ready?”

“As we’ll ever be,” Barry said, and Cisco spread his hands --

and then the world _lurched_ , and Cisco fell to his knees.

“Harry, what the _fuck_ was that --”

“I don’t know, West, it wasn’t the engine --”

A siren started blaring, harsh and matched by a flashing red light that cut right through Cisco’s awareness like a knife --

_a flash of somewhere else, an icy rocky mountainside where a man stood, raising his wasted arms to the rainbow-red sky, and even though his eyes were screwed up with the effort of what he was doing he opened his mouth and said:_

_“Remember, I thought of everything. Even this moment.”_

\-- and Cisco slammed back to the flight deck, where Barry and Caitlin were struggling to stay on their feet and Iris was punching buttons and Harry’s eyes were flicking back and forth so fast they blurred and the _sound_ , God, the too-familiar _roaring_ of everything crumbling around them --

“It’s DeVoe,” Cisco said between heaving, gasping breaths. “He’s bringing down the ship.”

Iris, Barry, and Caitlin all started shouting at once, but Cisco blocked them out. “Harry,” he said, pulling himself to his feet by the edge of the console, “what’s he doing?”

Harry’s hands came up almost absentmindedly to flick through readouts only he could see. “He’s taken out one of the thrusters,” Harry boomed over the cacophony the way he had the first time he’d ever spoken to Cisco, “and he’s hijacked the autopilot.”

“He can _do that?_ ” Iris yelled, tapping frantically at a screen that refused to cooperate. “Did we know he can --”

“Doesn’t matter.” Harry half-looked at Cisco again. “What does he want?”

“Um.” Cisco reluctantly reached for the white-hot wrongness that was simmering at the back of his mind and let himself fall --

_rage, and cunning, and a plan so much bigger than he’d expected, though he should have, should have figured it out, should have known that any sacrifice requires an altar, Mr. Ramon --_

“He wants me,” Cisco panted, “and he wants the dark matter engine.”

“What for?” Caitlin shouted. 

“Doesn’t _matter._ ” Harry stood, and his eyes were clear. “He’s not going to get what he wants.”

“Harry,” Iris said, “can you get the autopilot back under our control?”

“No, he’s inserted himself into the program too completely.” The floor lurched again, and Harry flickered. “But if I disable the autopilot entirely, the ship will crash to the surface, destroying the engine.”

The air tightened, as they all realized. 

“And the ship along with it, right?” Iris’s voice was smaller than Cisco had ever heard it. 

“Unless you have a better idea,” Harry said, not unkindly.

“If DeVoe gets the engine, it’ll be bad?” She directed that question to Cisco, who saw the resignation in her eyes even before he nodded grimly. 

Iris breathed in, breathed out. Gave her head a little shake, like maybe that would dislodge any memories of Earth that were keeping her hoping. “Okay,” she said. “Do it, Harry.”

Harry braced his hands on the console, and his breath might have hitched a little, or Cisco might have imagined it. “The escape pods are outfitted with survival packs -- coats, food, water, everything you’ll need.” There was silence, as they all stared at him. “Well, get going!”

Iris grabbed Barry’s hand and tugged him toward the elevator, Caitlin following close behind. Cisco went, too, holding his hand out for Harry as if he could have pulled him along.

“Come on, dude, I want a window seat,” he joked, because there was nothing else for it.

Harry put an arm out, stopping Cisco in his tracks. Their eyes met, and that was when Cisco should have realized what was about to happen, because Harry’s were wet and miserable and heartbreakingly _sure_.

“Cisco,” he said, “I can’t go with you.”

Cisco was only dimly aware of the other three freezing in place behind Harry, even though the elevator had just _dinged_ onto the flight deck. “Sure you can.”

“No.” Harry took a shuddering breath. “The escape pods aren’t connected to the ship’s computer.” 

“So we’ll download you.” Cisco’s mouth was full of wool, and so was his head, and he hadn’t known it was possible to feel so dry and dumb and desperate. “We’ll transfer your program to the pod computer, no problem --”

Harry laughed, empty. “I am, quite possibly, the most sophisticated AI ever created. You don’t have time to download me.”

“But.” The other three, over Harry’s shoulder, looking at him with so much pity he was sure it would shatter him apart. “If the ship is destroyed, you will be, too. I’m not leaving you here.”

“You have to.”

“No, I --” he reached up to hold Harry’s face between his hands but he couldn’t get close enough, the floor was shaking too badly -- “I’ll stay here with you, then.”

The lines of Harry’s face went hard. “Don’t be an idiot, Cisco. You would die.”

“Maybe.”

“ _Definitely._ And I’m not worth it. I’m not real.”

Furious tears dripped down Cisco’s face, and he didn’t care. “What are you talking about, you are real, you _are_ \--”

“Not real enough to leave this ship.” Harry was so close that Cisco should have felt the vibrations of his voice on his own lips, but he didn’t. “Just real enough to save you.”

Cisco shook his head endlessly, out of words. Harry ran his fingers over the space above Cisco’s hair.

“Let me save you, Cisco,” he said, his voice going gruff with feeling. “And you’ll survive, and you’ll defeat DeVoe, and -- and you’ll find him.”

Cisco’s heart clenched around the words. “Him?”

“Him. Me. The other me.” Harry squeezed his eyes tight, just for a moment, and when he opened them he looked almost calm. “You’ll find him, Cisco. And he’ll love you, because he’s me, and there’s no version of the universe where any version of me doesn’t love you.”

Cisco was never going to stop crying, just like he was never going to be able to move his feet from this exact spot. He looked up into Harry’s eyes and leaned closer, listening for the vibration of his photons, for anything but empty space and sirens and the crashing of the ship through an alien atmosphere --

“Find him. Find me,” Harry whispered. “Now go.”

And Cisco opened his mouth to say _no_ , to say _not on your life_ , to say _you said you weren’t going anywhere, you promised me, Harry_ \-- 

but before he could say anything, all the air had been knocked out of his lungs by a flash of lightning, and he was in the elevator, kicking and scratching against Barry’s impossibly strong grip. And through the door he could see Harry, silhouetted against the rainbow light, raising a hand in farewell like they were going to see each other again, the bastard. 

And the door was closing, and Cisco was screaming, and that was it.

\---

The others watched from the escape pod as _Providence I_ burned through the atmosphere and exploded. Cisco curled up in his seat, as far away from the window as he could get, and tried to forget how to exist.

\---

_I swim through the golden edges of dimensions, my mind diving deeper and deeper with every push. I’ve learned how to see into the universe, how to hear, how to watch as time unraveled before me in its twisting, knotted skeins. But it’s only now, thanks to Jesse, thanks to him, that I think I’ve figured out how to feel into the universe._

_The boundary, despite what DeVoe’s done to it, is still strong, and I was never meant to cross it. I can touch it, though. I can poke around the places where it’s cracked and the light is bleeding through. And when I find the right spot, I can put my mouth right up to the keyhole, so to speak, and whisper across time and space and everything else into the universe, into him:_

_Come find us, Cisco. Come find me._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You can yell at me in the comments or on Tumblr at she-is-the-doctor. 
> 
> (I love you all for reading. And this is so, so far from the end.)


	13. How Could the End Be Happy

Just before the pod went into its landing pattern, Cisco felt something, and looked up.

A feather-light stroke of a finger over his heart. Familiar, somehow, like it belonged to a hand that had touched him before. But before he could parse it, before he could remember, the feeling was gone.

“Cisco?” Barry said softly, reaching over from the opposite seat to put a hand on his shoulder. “Are you --”

“Don’t _touch_ me, Barry,” Cisco hissed, and folded back in on himself.

\---

_Here are some things you should know about Proxima B, if you’re ever in the area and decide to make a day of it:_

_\- The twilight zone is really fucking cold. Not uninhabitably so, not quite. Just extremely unpleasant. Just cold enough that the wind burns and the ice never lets you be. Bring a big coat, and try not to breathe too deep._

_\- Thanks to the tidal locking, days and years on Proxima B both last 11.2 Earth days. But another side effect of tidal locking its that it’s always sunset and it’s always winter, so really, time is meaningless and nothing matters. (Actually, scratch that. I know what it feels like when time is actually meaningless. I’d take endless twilight any day.)_

_\- The auroras are actually annoyingly beautiful. The kind of thing Ramon would love to gaze up at in open-mouthed awe. (I hope he can still do that. I hope the bad vibes didn’t ruin it for him.)_

_\- Standing on the surface of the planet, you may think there is no life. Look closer: you will see some purple-gray flora that we might call lichen, except that it spreads over rocks in incomprehensible spiral formations. You will see some furry little four-legged things that we might call moles, except that they have poisonous fangs and dead, black eyes. You may also see the tunnels, the oddly circular tunnels that lead down to the much-warmer underground where many more less-terrifying things live. Whatever made the tunnels went extinct a long time ago. Probably for the best, because we wouldn’t have gotten a chance to call them anything before dying very painfully._

_\- If you encounter a single human man who’s been living on the planet for nineteen years and slowly ripping the spacetime continuum a new asshole, do not engage. Or do, and punt him straight into the nearest solar flare._

_(God, come on, Ramon. I hate waiting. I really do get bored easily.)_

\---

Later, Cisco would remember Caitlin handing him a pack and a pair of heavy snow boots but not how he managed to lace them up; he would remember Iris zipping up his parka for him but not where she found the pulse rifle that she hefted over her shoulder before flinging open the escape pod hatch. He only faintly registered the biting blast of wind that rushed in when she did, and barely saw the landscape around them when he followed her out.

If he had cared enough to see it, though, Cisco would have seen the snow-streaked mountains reflecting the disco technicolor sky, the red sun twinkling just over their peaks, the clouds catching shades of scarlet he might not have known existed. He would have seen Iris and Barry and Caitlin staring, mouths open and heads swiveling hungrily, as they crunched through the valley-wide snow bank the pod had landed in. He would have seen an alien world, for the first time, just like Harry had --

 _goddamnit, Harry_ \--

but Cisco couldn’t see anything except Harry, lit up every which color as he went away to die. So he stood numbly while the others stared, pain occasionally slashing across his head and his heart.

Caitlin’s voice wobbled through the haze. “Iris, what -- what’s the plan?”

Iris adjusted the rifle on her shoulder. “I think,” she said slowly, “we should focus on finding shelter and fuel for a fire. Then we can go from there.”

“What about DeVoe?” Barry’s voice was quiet, as if saying the name could cause an avalanche.

“What about him, Barry? I don’t think we’re in any kind of state to take him --”

Lightning crashed across Cisco’s mind, bending him double. _Exhaustion, and cave walls glowing mossy purple, and anger but not despair, never despair --_

Cisco felt Caitlin’s hands on his back, at his temples. “Barry, Iris is right,” she said. “We can’t go after DeVoe with Cisco like this.”

“But he’s _making_ Cisco like this, don’t you think we should --”

“Stop that,” Cisco said through gritted teeth. He straightened up, blinking DeVoe from his eyes. Almost awake now, not to the world but to what he needed to do. “Stop talking about me like I’m not here.”

“Sorry.” Caitlin rubbed circles between his shoulder blades. “I just don’t think you should get any closer to DeVoe, for your own --”

“I think I should.” The other three looked at Cisco with that same, corrosive pity that made him want to climb out of his skin. “I want to finish this.”

Iris bit her lip. “Okay, but -- but let’s think about this, because there has to be a way we could do it without putting you in any more danger --”

“I’m the one who knows where he is,” Cisco cut her off. “I’m gonna have to lead the way.”

“Or, maybe, you could tell me where he is?” Barry looked Cisco in the eye tentatively, nervously. _Good._ “And then I could run Caitlin over --”

“And me,” Iris said, gripping the rifle tighter. 

“Right, yeah, you too, honey -- and then we could take care of DeVoe.”

Cisco clenched his teeth against the anger that was either his or DeVoe’s or both, he couldn’t tell anymore. “You gonna stop me from doing this, too, Barry?”

Barry inhaled sharply, like Cisco had burned him. “Come on, man, you know I didn’t have a --”

“What I know, _man_ , is that you and DeVoe are _both_ the reason Harry’s gone, and since I can’t kick _your_ ass --”

“Cisco.” Iris’s hand was on his shoulder. Cisco tried to shrug it off, but she just gripped tighter. “Cisco, that’s not fair.”

“What was I supposed to do, huh?” Barry spread his arms helplessly. “Let you stay there and die? So the rest of us would lose you _and_ Harry?”

“I could have _done something_ ,” Cisco shouted, and he jabbed Barry in his down-covered chest with the hand Iris wasn’t holding back. “I could have figured something out, you’re the one who said me and my _genius brain_ were gonna save all of us --”

“What would you have done, Cisco?” Barry was close to tears, tears that reflected the shifting rainbow light as they threatened to spill over. “In the _four minutes_ between when we left and when the ship crashed, with DeVoe destroying your mind _and_ the ship, what would you have done?”

Cisco opened and closed his mouth, gasping for answers. “ _Something._ I could have _tried_.”

“I wasn’t gonna risk it --”

“It wasn’t your risk to _take!_ ”

Barry’s bottom lip trembled. _Good._

Iris turned Cisco around to face her. She didn’t look angry, really, just tired. “Listen,” she said, “I know how much you’re hurting right now.”

“Like _hell_ you --”

“We all lost Harry, Cisco!” Cisco fell quiet, and watched as Iris ran her hand over her mouth. “I know it’s different for you, but we cared about him, too.”

“And running into danger won’t fix anything,” Caitlin said, coming up behind him to rub his back again. “Hurting yourself even more won’t make it better.”

“We all have to take care of each other.” Iris tried to smile, and couldn’t quite do it. “Now, more than ever.”

Barry made a quiet snuffling sound, and Cisco looked over in time to see him smile in spite of the tears now falling unhindered down his face. Cisco didn’t, couldn’t, wasn’t ready to smile back. But he didn’t shout anymore. Maybe that was enough.

“Fine,” he said. “But if you guys want to take care of me, you’re gonna have to let me brain-blast DeVoe into next Sunday. Because my seizures won’t get any better, and none of us will be safe --” _and Harry’s death won’t fucking mean anything --_ “until I deal with him.”

Iris inhaled slowly. “How are you going to do that?”

Cisco shrugged. “I’ll figure something out.”

“Then lead the way.”

\---

_A shudder runs along the boundary, like a subway shaking the dust loose under your feet. It’s all I can do to hold on, not get knocked back into my empty body in my empty room._

_DeVoe._

_He’s still working, whatever the hell that means. And it’s clearly paying off -- there are places where the boundary is so thin that I worry I could punch right through. I can’t, of course. But someone else could. DeVoe could, with Ramon’s help._

_I should reach for him again. It’s been too long, I think._

_My feelers go out again, through the cracks, through the honey-thick membrane between our universes. But there’s another quake, and I’m thrown, almost knocked off-center --_

_and I almost slip, then I do, then I’m slipping and something’s dragging me away from him --_

_and I’m on my back in my room, Tess’s snarling face looming over me._

_“What have you done?” the Other Place screams, forgetting that Tess’s voice doesn’t sound like the screeching of steel getting struck by lightning._

_“I think you know,” I say, and I reach out one last time, just for the space of a breath --_

_come on, Cisco, follow the sound of me --_

_before they cut me off._

\---

There it was again, the faintly swelling _something_ in Cisco’s chest that felt almost like happiness. Something like a hand in his, pulling him forward, away from the cold and the grief and the certainty of death, small chance of success --

“I can go again.”

“Are you sure, Cisco?” Caitlin put her hands out to catch him as he stood on wobbling legs, but he waved her away. The feeling was gone as quickly as it had come, but he still felt the strength of it in his blood.

“I’m sure,” he said, and shuffled through the last few feet of snow to stand on the crest of the hill Barry had dropped them on. It was a few degrees warmer here, the snowflakes bigger and softer, and Cisco figured they must be getting closer to the hot side of the planet. The pod was hundreds of miles behind, now, and DeVoe still hundreds ahead, but Cisco could feel him more clearly, sharper at the back of his throat, and he knew they were getting closer.

He reached for DeVoe again, letting the burn overtake him for just a moment -- it was getting easier, too easy, to fall into the inferno at the end of his mind --

_That’s right, Mr. Ramon, keep coming, and it can all be over soon --_

“That way,” Cisco gasped, and pointed between two mountains in the distance. 

Barry nodded, scooping Iris back into his arms and letting Cisco and Caitlin wrap themselves around him from behind. “All secure?” he said, and as soon as he felt them nod they were off, streaking through the snow and over the mountain pass so fast that the rainbows in the sky blurred and Cisco’s cheeks felt like they were trying to achieve a lifelong dream of being on the back of his head --

and with a thunderclap, it was over, and they were standing by a frozen lake. And Cisco’s head hurt worse than ever, because it was the same lake he’d seen in his mind, before everything, and that meant they were getting close.

“Okay, break time,” Caitlin said firmly, pushing a groaning Cisco and a panting Barry over to some rocks they could sit on. While she fed Barry a small pile of the nutrition bars they’d pilfered from the other survival packs in the pod, Iris sat down next to Cisco.

“Are you good?”

“Sure.” His head was between his knees, so Cisco knew he didn’t look particularly convincing. “Peachy.”

“Really.”

“ _No_ , Iris, I am extremely _not_ good.” Cisco straightened up, and Iris’s face wavered hazily pink and green before coming into focus. “Probably never been worse, actually. Is that what you want to hear?”

“Right, no, I mean --” she propped the rifle against the rock and took his gloved hands in hers, rubbing them so they could both get the feeling back -- “are you going to be able to keep going?”

Cisco looked past her, toward Proxima Centauri casting long red shadows over the lake. 

_(It’ll always be sunset, in that twilight zone._

_Romantic_.)

He pressed his eyes shut. “Big question, Iris.”

She squeezed his hands. “You know, once we take care of DeVoe, there might be a way for you to get back into the Other Place.”

Cisco groaned and let his head fall forward into Iris’s lap. “Let me stop you right there.” 

“Why?” Iris extracted a hand to brush his hair out of his face. “What are you scared of?”

_Of a Harry that doesn’t know me._

“I just don’t want to think about that right now,” Cisco said into their joined hands.

She kept stroking his hair, slow and soft. “Okay.”

_Of Harry being different, changed by the Other Place or just not quite my Harry because maybe he never was._

“Iris?” Cisco’s voice was so small, he was surprised it wasn’t carried away on the freezing wind. “Am I an idiot?”

“No, honey, no, not at all --”

“I just --” good thing his face was hidden in Iris’s coat, because he was dangerously close to crying -- “it was never going to be okay, and I _knew_ that, because he wasn’t -- he wasn’t -- but I _still_ \--”

 _Of losing him all over again because God, Iris, it wasn’t real_ \--

“Cisco.” Iris pulled him up by the coat and looked him right in the eye, deeper and clearer than anyone had ever looked at him before, maybe. “You loved him, and he loved you back. That was real. Okay?”

Cisco swallowed. Nodded. Breathed until the tears weren’t quite so close to the surface.

“I can go again,” he said, and his voice was bigger this time.

Caitlin and Barry looked over from their rock, Barry’s mouth still stuffed with protein bar. “Are you sure?” Caitlin asked.

“I’m sure.”

\---

_“We told you, you cannot leave.”_

_I laugh, because I think it’ll piss them off. “I wasn’t trying to. Just trying to show Ramon how to bust us out.”_

_The Other Place growls in my face. “You could have ruined everything.”_

_“Good. Fuck your plan.”_

_They sit back on Tess’s heels, then, with an unbearably smug look on her face. “Doctor Wells, our plan is well on its way, despite your best efforts.”_

_I pull myself up to sitting. “What are you talking about?”_

_“Cisco Ramon and his friends are at DeVoe’s doorstep. They will reach him any moment now.”_

_“No.” I try to see back into the universe, try to see what could have gone so horribly wrong since the last time I checked, but I can only get flashes of Cisco crying, of_ Providence _burning up in the multicolor atmosphere, before they cut me off again. “You have to let me --”_

_“We do not have to do anything.”_

_I scramble to my feet, ready to fight or run or dive back into the multiverse. “You can’t let them die fixing your mess for you.”_

_The Other Place stands, trying to look placid, giving their panic away with the muscle twitching in Tess’s jaw. “You misunderstand the situation again, Wells.”_

_“No, I understand perfectly.” I clench my fists. Jesse’s not here, this time, to hold me back. “You just don’t want to admit you fucked up. That you can see everything and do anything, and your grand cosmic plans to save us and kill DeVoe still failed. That you’re not as smart as you think you are.”_

_The Other Place takes a deep breath. If I didn’t know any better, I’d say they look scared. “He will destroy everything, if he is not stopped.”_

_And suddenly, I do understand. I know what the key is. Because they_ are _scared, and I know how that feels. And I’m shit with feelings, but I’ve been getting better, and if it’ll save the multiverse, I’ve got to try._

_“This is your home,” I say. “You love it. And sometimes, love makes you stupid. But you’re not the only ones whose home is in danger.”_

_They narrow Tess’s eyes at me, and it’s not quite threatening. “Do you really believe that Cisco Ramon could release you without destroying the boundary?”_

_“Yes.” My hands relax. “He can do anything.”_

_The Other Place looks out the window, at the endless yellow fields that must mean something to them, even if they look like nothing to me. “Then you may do what you will. But we will be watching.”_

\---

Cisco knew when they reached the cave. Not because he recognized it immediately -- it looked too like every other eerily round tunnel mouth they’d passed -- but because the interference stopped. The others noticed it too, even, because his spine uncurved, his jaw unclenched, and his whole body unwound for the first time in weeks.

“Cisco?” Caitlin asked.

“He’s here.” Cisco could feel it, even without the constant assault of bad vibes. Something about this place -- “I guess he’s letting me approach peacefully, or something.”

“Alright.” Iris shouldered her pulse rifle and shook the snow out of her hair. “I guess we always knew a surprise attack was out of the question. So we’re gonna go in slowly, and Cisco, let us know if you sense any shift in DeVoe’s, you know, vibe.”

Cisco nodded. Got three nods back, and started moving.

It was all the same as before -- the monstrous mouth of the tunnel, the slow warming of the walls, the gradual replacement of the rainbow-red light from outside with the cool pulsing of the mosses. Cisco heard the others gasp at it, just like he did the first time. He would have told them to be quiet if he had thought it mattered. If he hadn’t been distracted by something, something that _wasn’t_ the same, that he hadn’t felt when he’d been here as a specter --

“Don’t touch it, Barry!” Caitlin whispered, pulling Barry’s hand back from a patch of moss. “Not without --” She got distracted and drew closer, the tip of her nose reflecting the thumping blue-green glow. “Do you think it’s a fungus?”

“Nah, the stem structure looks more bryophytic to me --”

“But there’s no way they photosynthesize, not all the way down here --”

“Can we focus up, please?” Iris whispered. “Plenty of time to nerd out _after_ the current crisis.” 

“Sorry, babe --”

Iris stopped walking. “Cisco?”

Because Cisco was standing with his hand on the wall, possibly-pathogenic bioluminescent mosses be damned, with his eyes closed and every sense reaching for the golden vibrations he could feel just under the surface --

“It’s the Other Place,” he whispered. Because even though it was just a faint scent in the air, instead of a sea flooding his lungs like it had been when he’d vibed Jesse, it was unmistakable: the jangling weirdness, the warm-dark light, the quarks in everything spinning just a little bit wrong. “It’s -- I don’t know, it’s like it’s closer here, somehow. Like it’d be easier to break through.”

“Easier,” Caitlin murmured, her eyes going wide. “Like the last time I went in.”

Cisco frowned, trying to dig deeper, trying to find the source. “Almost like -- like the boundary is --”

_Have you figured it out yet, Mr. Ramon? Can you feel what the Enlightenment will be?_

“ _Fuck!_ ” Cisco yelled, even though the pain dissipated quickly. The others rushed over to him, concerned for all the wrong reasons, and he waved them off to keep marching down the passage. “Come on, guys. I think I know what that motherfucker’s going to do.”

The tunnel grew wider and wider as they walked, until it eventually, finally opened up into a massive cavern. Cisco could barely make out the ceiling, but the floor and the colossal stalagmites rising up out of it were so covered in the glowing moss that he had no trouble making out the stooped figure standing in the middle of it all.

Iris shoved past Cisco and aimed her pulse rifle at the man. Cisco heard the whine of the gathering stun blast as she cocked it.

“Hands up,” she called. “ _Now._ ”

The figure just laughed, and limped closer, and as he did Cisco felt that same clattering chaos, that same discordant _brokenness_ that he’d felt in DeVoe’s mind -- it wasn’t just his mind, it was his skin, his heart, his whole body, veins of white-hot shrieking agony just barely held together by rage and resolve --

“Mr. Ramon,” DeVoe wheezed. “How nice of you to finally join me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay on this one! I've been very busy, and season 3 of One Day at a Time came out, and the chapters right AFTER big climactic action-y ones are always the hardest. But I (eventually) had a lot of fun with this one, with creating Proxima B as a world and figuring out how all the characters react to the events of Chapter 12. Hope you enjoyed, and as always, thank you for reading and for your amazing, affirming, mind-blowing comments. Tune in next time for... well. You'll see.


	14. Follow Me Or Perish

Cisco had seen DeVoe before, of course, in his hazy blue visions and on TV, so long ago.

(A blinding flash, and then silence. The click-burst of cameras over the face of a man watching his world fall down. Then a storm of voices, of “ _What was that_ ”s and “ _Dr. DeVoe, Dr. DeVoe_ ”s, and then the clattering of the countdown microphone as it fell to the floor.

Then a “ _Leave, all of you,_ ” and a “ _NOW,_ ” and a door slammed shut for the last time.)

But here, in the greenish light of the cave, Cisco saw him as he was now, clearly, for the first time: old, fragile, and furiously, self-righteously _smug_ in that way that only old white men really knew how to be. And seeing that look on that face, even though they’d come here to strike him down, even though they’d stopped him from getting the engine, even though _Harry had died to stop him from getting the engine_ \--

“Nobody’s joining anybody,” Cisco said, voice trembling with rage. Not his best, he probably should’ve been able to come up with a better opener in the space between two solar systems, but he was past caring. “This ends now.”

DeVoe laughed, and the echo of it around the cavern almost drowned out the rising whine of Iris’s pulse rifle. 

“Oh, Mr. Ramon,” he said, clucking his tongue. “I must say, I’m disappointed. Self-delusion is so unflattering.”

Cisco felt Barry and Caitlin draw up closer behind him, felt Barry humming with energy on one side and Caitlin sizzling cold on the other, and he felt -- well, not safe. But not alone, either.

“You’re the deluded one,” he said, trying to draw strength from the golden river of energy running just under his awareness. “I know what you’re trying to do here, and it won’t work. We’ve already foiled your fucking evil plan.”

“Have you finally caught up, now?” When DeVoe smirked, the dissonant buzz coming from under his skin slid more slimily down Cisco’s spine. “What exactly am I _trying to do here_ , Mr. Ramon?”

Cisco ignored Iris’s sharp intake of breath and stepped forward, just a bit. Just close enough to see the atrophy in DeVoe’s face, the wrinkles like fault lines and the skin threatening to flake away into dust. The eyes, cold and nearly colorless, that were haughty but also unfocused, as if DeVoe was half somewhere else, focused on holding together something only he could see.

“You want to destroy the boundary between our dimension and the Other Place,” Cisco said. “That’s your Enlightenment _._ ”

DeVoe stepped closer, too, smelling like rot and burnt copper wires. “Correct.”

And then the lightning split open Cisco’s mind again, and he saw an unfathomable flood of light, a tear in the fabric of reality pouring the contents of one universe into another --

_When we break open the Speed Force, Mr. Ramon --_

_Stop calling it that. Also, there’s no “we” --_

_\-- the dark energy will do to everything what it has already done to your DNA. We will be better, stronger, and we will live in a universe of unlimited energy and innovation._

But Cisco was watching this so-called Enlightenment, and the merging of the two dimensions wasn’t innovating anything, just destroying, just burning, the golden guts of the Other Place unraveling minds and galaxies and timelines --

_You’re so fucking stupid, DeVoe. So far the Other Place has only released dark energy in extremely controlled bursts, and if you release it all at once there’s no way anyone will survive it --_

_There is no gain without risk._

_It’s not a "risk," it’s definitely --_

DeVoe’s grip on Cisco’s mind tightened, and like a spitting hiss in his ear came the words _All that light, and they hide it away. All that power, and they use it to play with us like toys --_

_Oh, okay, so you’re really just salty that they kicked your ass --_

In the real world, Cisco was knocked off his real feet by a wave of white-hot energy. He landed on his back, the moss not providing anywhere near as much cushioning as he would have hoped, and groaned as Barry, Caitlin, and Iris closed in between him and DeVoe.

“I would have brought the human race salvation!” DeVoe shouted, the crack in his voice reverberating around the dark corners of the cavern. “And what did I get for my efforts?”

“What you deserved, I’d say,” Iris said down the barrel of her gun.

DeVoe laughed again, lower and more unhinged. “Wrong, Ms. West. Because the Speed Force tried to kill me, and I survived. They tried to stop me, and they made me more powerful. They tried to tear me apart, atom by atom, and I still have not succumbed to their entropy --”

Cisco’s awareness briefly flickered into DeVoe’s body, where his bones and blood were trembling with effort --

_oh,_ he thought, almost realizing --

before he was slammed back again by the wall of DeVoe’s mind. He coughed, as if all the hurt could be dislodged from his body as easily as a wayward dust mote, and hauled himself up to his feet.

“Good, Mr. Ramon,” DeVoe said smoothly. “I want you to be in fighting shape. Because another thing the Speed Force gave me was time, time to plan, and you are going to help me realize it.”

“Well, joke’s on you.” Cisco tried laughing himself, and almost managed to make it not sound sad. “The dark matter engine, the big key to your plan? It was destroyed along with the ship. Now there’s no way you’ll ever breach into the Other Place.”

DeVoe smiled, slow and predatory. Iris shivered and adjusted her aim so the rifle pointed square at DeVoe’s mouth.

“That’s right. I do have to congratulate you all. Letting Wells’ virtual _pet_ die, so to speak, was a maneuver I didn’t anticipate from you.”

Cisco dug his nails into his palms. “Yeah, ‘cause he was smarter than you.”

“Wrong again, Mr. Ramon.” 

Cisco felt DeVoe wrap himself around his mind again and tried to fight it. But the bad vibe was too harsh, too probing, and it scalded him whenever he tried to push back.

_The engine is not strictly necessary._

Cisco’s veins went cold. _What are you --_

_It would have been nice to have, certainly. Would have made it so much easier to harness you, to channel your power, because you had already forged a connection to the Speed Force through it. But no matter. You and I will just have to work a bit harder._

Cisco felt a storm building in him, rage and fusion and solar wind gathering in his fingertips. _You mean --_

_Yes, I mean your silly little simulation of Wells sacrificed itself for nothing._

_No --_

_You are so gullible, Mr. Ramon, it’s really very disappointing. You fall so easily -- for an image, for a man who never loved anything but himself, for the notion that death means anything at all --_

_You’re wrong --_

DeVoe crushed in on him, and Cisco clenched his fists, reaching again for the Other Place, for the energy running through him, for anything but the knowledge that Harry -- that he hadn’t --

and _there_ , there it was again, that tender something like a reassuring squeeze of his hand --

_But in the end,_ DeVoe boomed through his skull, _I am grateful. Because your mind will fall that much more easily to me._

“No!” Cisco shouted, and then all the electron-spitting anger was flowing out of him, literally out of his hands, and an explosion of blue-white energy was blasting DeVoe back like a rag doll.

Then a flash, and Barry was on DeVoe, pinning him to the mossy floor, one arm raised and ready to strike. Caitlin and Iris quickly followed, aiming their icy hands and glowing rifle at DeVoe’s wheezing chest. 

Cisco strode forward, tendrils of light still snaking around his fingers. “Who’s falling now?”

DeVoe coughed, and that weird, brittle energy in his veins pulsed in time with his stuttering heartbeat. Then he looked at Cisco, seeming barely to notice Barry on top of him, and narrowed his eyes.

“Fascinating,” he croaked. “You are drawing power from the Speed Force. And from --”

DeVoe smiled. Cisco was really starting to hate that smile.

“Oh,” he said through leering teeth. “Adorable.”

A blast like a supernova, and Barry, Iris, and Caitlin were flying backward --

and Cisco was reaching out to do something, cushion their falls, breach them away, anything --

but then DeVoe’s real hand was around his real throat, pressing just hard enough to suggest the possibility of choking.

“You will be easy, after all,” he hissed in Cisco’s face.

It took every ounce of willpower Cisco had not to struggle against DeVoe’s grip. The other three had hit the ground hard, and he tried to listen for groans, any sign that they were getting back up --

“You _will_ help me open the Speed Force,” DeVoe continued, “because that is the only way you can be reunited with your precious _Wells_.”

“No,” Cisco rasped, but it sounded half-hearted even to his ears, because -- well, because what if it was true, what if stopping DeVoe meant never seeing Harry again -- neither Harry, not the one who had died to stop this and not the one Cisco was terrified of meeting but more terrified of living without --

“Look how weak your grief has made you.” DeVoe squeezed tighter, and the edges of Cisco’s vision went red. He sucked in a too-shallow breath and tried to fight it, fight the mild oxygen deprivation, the not-so-mild temptation -- tried to focus on something else, anything other than how bad he wanted to give up --

and there was a snowflake drifting past DeVoe’s ear, how weird --

“Don’t you want the pain to stop?” DeVoe whispered.

Cisco felt it again, that feeling like the fingers of someone who loved him on his cheek. He let his eyes flutter shut, just for a fraction of a second, and thought again of Harry, who had made him stronger, not weaker. Both Harrys, one who was counting on him not to fuck up the multiverse and one whose death wasn’t going to mean nothing, _goddamnit,_ not if Cisco had anything to say about it. Harry, who would be calling him an idiot right now for even considering --

He opened his eyes. “I’ll take the pain. Bring it on.”

And then DeVoe was knocked aside by a concussive burst of ice, and Cisco stumbled and gasped cold air into his hungry lungs and there was _Caitlin_ , frost-streaked hair whipping in the snowy wind she’d made, eyes white and angry and _oh,_ Cisco thought. _There it is._

And there she was, just like in his very first vision, not evil at all but firing swaths of frozen spindles at DeVoe to drive him back from Cisco. She coated his limbs with ice, the weight bringing him down to one knee as the frost climbed up his legs, up his arms, up his face. 

And then the ice was sloughing off him, but Barry was a blur around him, trying to land punches that sometimes hit and sometimes deflected off a blast of solid light --

and suddenly Barry had DeVoe in a headlock, and Iris was holding the barrel of her gun against his head and Caitlin was reaching into her coat pocket for --

_NO._

It was almost a scream and almost a hole in the universe, tearing at Cisco’s awareness without precision or pretense. He doubled over with the pain of it, and so he was only vaguely aware of the pulse rifle shattering into atoms in Iris’s hands, of his friends doubling over too, of their bodies going rigid with the pain of it --

_Make your choice. Help me, or find out what grief really is._

Cisco gritted his teeth against the dagger aimed at his mind. _Never._

_I cracked the_ Providence _like an egg, Mr. Ramon. Do you really want to see what I’m capable of doing to your little friends?_

Cisco dragged his eyes open and saw Iris, looking at him through tears and bulging veins. _Don’t hurt them. Please._

The air pulsed with dangerous energy. _Your choice, Mr. Ramon._

Iris’s mouth was moving, just barely. “ _Do it_ ,” she mouthed.

Cisco shook his head, or maybe he was just shaking -- what did she mean, what was she saying --

Iris’s eyes flicked over to Caitlin -- Caitlin, who had the cure in her coat pocket -- and then back to Cisco.

“ _Distract him_ ,” she mouthed.

“Fine,” Cisco said hoarsely.

DeVoe grinned, and Iris, Caitlin, and Barry collapsed to the ground, unmoving.

“Very good.”

And then Cisco was nowhere, and everywhere, and DeVoe was dragging him through the viscous boundary between realities. He could feel the fractures in it, the threadbare bits where golden light threatened to leak through, and he hated how fragile it all felt, how close the dam was to breaching.

_You feel it? How close the Enlightenment is?_

_Yeah, I feel it. Fuck you._

_You need only push, Mr. Ramon. They will let you in._

It was so easy, too easy, to let himself fly forward into the light.

The boundary was so thin. So easy.

But there was something else. Too easy. Something pulling Cisco along so firmly he didn’t even have to try. That same hand over his heart, that same swelling, that pounding, that _feeling_ , what _was it_ \--

it wrapped him up, drew him in, and it felt like home, felt like fitting into a slot that was made for him, felt like --

almost like --

\---

_I’m going to tell you something, Ramon, and I’m going to choose my words carefully. Because, when you’re psychically screaming something across the interdimensional void, you should make sure to get the phrasing right. And because -- because I don’t know if you’re going to believe me. So I’m going to say it as truthfully as I can._

_I lost myself a long time ago, before all of us were lost to the world. For years, I didn’t have anything in me but grief and work, numbers and missions, telling lies on television and keeping Jesse alive. Nothing left of the man I was was but memories._

_So when we got here, it was so easy, too easy, to let that last kernel of myself go. And I spent those twenty years -- or two thousand years, or ten seconds, or whatever -- forgetting, which is exactly what I’d spent every day since Tess trying to do._

_And because there wasn’t anything so sordid as a personality tethering me to my body, I could drift. I drifted out of the Other Place. I drifted back into the world. But eventually, finally, I drifted into you._

_And you -- you brought me back to myself. With your mouth, and your mind, and that foolhardy way you have of loving your friends to the ends of every Earth. You helped me remember my name, and how to want something other than emptiness, and that I’m allowed to love ideas and stars and people who smile bigger than the space between solar systems. And I do, Ramon, I love you. It’s stupid how much I love you. Except it’s not stupid at all, because loving the light in the darkness is probably the only thing in this universe that makes any goddamn sense._

_And I’m not just saying this because the fate of the galaxy depends on it. I mean, I am. But it’s also true. I hope you can feel that._

_So feel it. Reach out for it. Reach out for me, Cisco, you’re so close --_

_you’re so --_

_\---_

Cisco’s eyes flew open, the light from two dimensions colliding only burning his retinas a little.

_\-- almost like Harry._

And it wasn’t, couldn’t be, he refused to let himself believe it was. But he knew what love felt like, because love was always going to feel like Harry. And someone, somewhere was radiating so much love that he could follow it, right up to where he was supposed to turn the key and open the door _just enough_ \--

And suddenly, Cisco saw the way.

A universe away, some part of him made eye contact with Caitlin, where she was playing dead on the ground behind DeVoe. And with the only energy left in his bones, he mouthed a word to her:

“ _Three._ ”

Caitlin nodded, and from the deepest pocket of her coat she drew a tiny syringe. She made eye contact with Barry, and was ready.

“ _Two._ ”

Back at the boundary, Cisco reached out. Somewhere, there was a hand, and it was reaching for him, too, and it couldn’t really be be a hand because that probably wasn’t how parallel universes worked --

and Cisco grabbed on, and it couldn’t really be Harry because it _wasn’t_ , even though that was what he’d always imagined Harry’s fingers would feel like wrapped around his own --

“ _One._ ”

And Cisco _pulled_ and he _ripped_ \--

and there was a blinding flash of light --

and a breach opened in the Other Place.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oof.
> 
> (Sorry again for taking so long with this one. Thank you all so much for your comments and for sticking with me. We're so close.)


	15. Quietly Into the Night

_For one spectacular moment, I’m holding his hand._

_Then, I’m falling down a glittering blue vortex, being swept through the boundary like a snowflake in the wind, and I’m vaguely aware of Jesse next to me and the rest of the crew tumbling just behind --_

_and then I’m lying face down on the ground._

_The ground. It’s rough, mossy, the opposite of the Other Place’s too-smooth, too-shiny simulated surfaces. It smells like dirt, and plants, and moisture and cool stone and nothing like the lightning made solid that we’ve been breathing for twenty years. My fingers close around the pulsing purple tendrils of moss, and even though my head is aching with the sudden assault on the senses I haven’t had to fully use in ages, I drink it all in. The colors, the smells, the textures. The world._

_I hear Jesse groaning as she pushes herself up to all fours beside me, and I heave myself up onto an elbow so I can look at her. Her hair is in her face from our fall through the multiverse, and her nose is wrinkled up from the sensory overload, and she’s smiling, wider and freer than she has in God knows how long._

_“Dad,” she says, and she laughs in wild relief. And I grab her hand in mine, and I do too._

_And the others, all two hundred and one of them, are lying and sitting and staggering to their feet around us, in this cave full of shimmering columns of stone stretching up to a ceiling I can barely see. They’re laughing too, and hugging, and touching everything they can reach --_

_but quickly, they’re all turning, pointing, yelling, because we are not the only ones here. At the center of the cavern is a blazing ball of light, two figures at its core and three others around its periphery looking poised to strike, and I don’t have to scramble up and push my way through the crowd to see who they are, but I do anyway._

_And I see DeVoe, looking too pleased with himself for how close he is to fracturing along the fault lines the Other Place put there nineteen years ago._

_And I see Cisco, and he’s shaking with the effort of holding the universe together, and he’s shining like the sun._

\---

The time between the beginning and the end was only seconds, only a few vibrations of the universe, but to Cisco it felt like an eternity.

The end: A breach opened in the Other Place, and Cisco was vaguely aware of two hundred and three somethings streaming out of it. He was a bit distracted, though, by the strain of keeping all of existence from ripping apart along the weakened seam he’d just busted open.

_Very good_. DeVoe’s voice was too big, too happy, taking up too much space in Cisco’s head. _Now let go, Mr. Ramon. Let it fall --_

_Nope_ , Cisco thought, letting the refusal reclaim his mind. _We can’t let you continue, jackass._

The end: Somewhere, some place smaller but no less real than the _everything_ that was burning around him, Cisco finished a countdown. And Caitlin knew what to do, because she knew him, and she gripped the syringe tighter in her hand.

“ _Barry!_ ” she yelled, and threw the cure into the air --

and a flash, and a curdling scream, and Barry had plunged the needle into DeVoe’s neck.

The end: Cisco laughed, weary and triumphant, and waited for the light around DeVoe to fizzle out. But instead it got brighter, shone stronger through the cracks in the artifice of his body, even as DeVoe’s eyes dulled and his arms sagged --

and Cisco’s awareness was split, one last time, by a white-hot crackling bad vibe.

_The pain was unimaginable. Every cell threatening to combust as the Speed Force’s mortal blast tore their bonds apart. And falling, falling away from paradise, through the golden ocean between, toward this frozen wasteland and certain death --_

_but no, not certain, never certain, because the dark matter lent its power even as it killed, and with the resolve built over a lifetime of refusing to bow it was easy_

_(not easy, it was agony and nineteen years of sleepless feverish nights tying and retying the knots of a body that wanted to unravel, but it was the only choice)_

_easy to keep it together. To defy the entropy they’d planted in me, Mr. Ramon, long enough to see the plan through --_

Cisco wrenched his mind away from DeVoe’s memories. And he saw, in the real world, that without his powers there was nothing keeping DeVoe’s body from unspooling into the stream of dark energy that had expelled him from the Other Place all those years ago and --

_oh_ \--

and Cisco knew, he _knew_ how to fix the _everything_ , and it was perfect, almost like it had been planned, but what the hell kind of plan was it if he had to watch DeVoe’s face break apart in front of him --

_Are you happy now, Mr. Ramon?_

_Not really, no._

And somewhere, DeVoe’s body fizzed away into dark light. And somewhere else, the light wrapped itself around Cisco’s fingers.

The beginning: With his shiny new threads of dark energy, Cisco stitched up the hole in the Other Place. It was easy, once he saw how to do it. There were hands, maybe, though nothing like any hands he’d ever felt or seen, helping him, holding the edges together where he needed to sew them shut. And a voice, or voices, that sounded kind of like his brother and kind of like his friends and kind of like nothing at all:

_Thank you, Cisco Ramon._

_Yeah. Maybe show your gratitude by not ever messing with our shit again, okay?_

Something like a wry chuckle reverberated in Cisco’s blood. _Same to you._

\---

Cisco opened his eyes to a smothering feeling, and panicked for a split second before he realized it wasn’t DeVoe’s hands or the choking golden energy of the Other Place, it was his friends. They were hugging him so tight he couldn’t move if he wanted to -- Barry laughing and ruffling his hair, Iris kissing his cheek through happy tears, Caitlin trying to cling to him and check for injuries at the same time. And Cisco clung to them right back, reveling in the realness of their bodies, their joy, and let the seconds tick by like that. There was no rush, now.

Eventually, Iris broke the group hug and, wiping her nose, pointed behind her to the sloping sides of the cavern.

“Look, Cisco,” she said, which was unnecessary because he obviously saw, but he grabbed Iris’s hand and stumbled forward anyway.

A crowd, an absolute _host_ of people in blue-gray _Providence_ uniforms, was crawling to their feet and spreading out across the cave, eyes permanently wide and mouths permanently agape. Two hundred and three of them, if Cisco had to hazard a guess. And a some of them were directing their awestruck elation at the cavern or at each other, but a lot of them were looking at him and the other three --

and then the breath was knocked out of Cisco’s body by a hurtling teenager, and there were arms were wrapped around his neck in a hug so forceful it spun him around in circles.

“Cisco,” Jesse said in his ear, “you found us.”

A smile spread across Cisco’s face, and he squeezed her right back. “‘Course I did.”

Jesse pulled back, her blue eyes shining, and started rattling off questions in a way that made Cisco certain that they would get along swimmingly. “How did you do it? What was that thing with the ball of light? Where did --”

But then she saw something over Cisco’s shoulder and cut herself off. “I’m actually gonna -- I want to introduce myself to your --”

And Cisco only had a second to process what had just happened before --

“Hey --”

\-- he heard _that voice_ , and felt a _hand_ on his shoulder, and spun around and saw _that face_ , and his body reacted before his brain even had a chance to put it all together. He scrambled backward, knocking the hand off his shoulder, and felt his breath go cold and hard in his lungs. Everything -- the purple-green cavern, the crowd of passengers, Jesse talking the ears off his friends -- fell away. 

It was Harry. No, not Harry. But _yes, Harry_ , and he looked exactly the same -- scowly, beautiful, not a day older than he’d been when he disappeared in a flash of light -- save for the _Providence_ uniform he was wearing. His hand was still outstretched, still frozen in the space where Cisco had been, and his eyes were wide, wide open.

“Hi,” he said, the corner of his mouth almost twitching into a smile.

“Fuck,” Cisco breathed.

Harry frowned at him. And _God,_ if he’d ever thought that this Harry might be different enough for him to separate the two in his head -- Cisco knew that frown so well, had loved that face so recklessly, and to see it pointed at him so uncomprehendingly was more than he could stand --

“Sorry.” Cisco screwed his eyes up, just for the second he needed to stop himself from doing something irredeemably pathetic like crying, then opened them again. Harry ( _Wells? Are we making distinctions again?_ ) had lowered his hand, but was still watching him warily. “I just -- you wouldn’t know, you can’t, because you -- you don’t know me, Dr. Wells, but --”

“Ramon.”

That stopped Cisco’s rambling. How did --

Wells ( _Harry?_ ) licked his lips nervously, which was one of the absolute worst things he could have done for Cisco’s fragile resolve, and stepped closer. Cisco could feel -- shit _,_ he could _feel_ the man’s molecules vibrating, solid and warm and still glowing with residual transdimensional energy. _Real_.

“I do know you.” Harry’s voice was soft, as close to tentative as Cisco had ever heard it. “I -- I could see you from the Other Place, Ramon. I saw almost everything.”

Cisco’s hands came up to cover his face of their own accord. He could feel the shame rising, hot and caustic, in his cheeks. “Jesus,” he mumbled. “I am _so_ sorry.”

“What are you apologizing for?” Harry said, and for a man who’d been put in the unenviable position of having to break up with his computer’s boyfriend, he sounded so _kind._

Cisco lowered his fingers an inch to see Harry still staring at him. He was close enough to reach out and touch, and there had never been anything Cisco had wanted to do more, or anything he had known with more certainty would trigger the immediate heat-death of his universe.

“For being so embarrassing.” Cisco hated how small his voice sounded. “I let things get way out of hand with --” _with you_ \-- “with your hologram.”

Harry nodded, slow and careful. “You loved him.” 

“Yeah. And I know that’s _insane_ , and I don’t wanna make things weird for you, so I’ll just --” _launch myself back into space_ \-- “I’ll leave you alone.”

Harry’s eyes fell closed, and Cisco saw him take an unsteady breath. “Right,” he said, and his voice was rough with emotion the way Cisco had heard it get just hours ago. “I understand.”

Cisco blinked. He was seized suddenly by the overwhelming feeling that he was missing something. He lowered his hands further. “Understand?”

Harry rubbed a hand over his jaw, eyes locked on the ground between them. “That you don’t. Want me.”

Something in Cisco’s chest crashed down through his stomach and into his feet. His heart, maybe.

“What.” _Stupid_. He sounded stupid. 

Harry pinched the bridge of his nose. “ _I_ should be embarrassed,” he said, “because I was watching you all that time and I let myself -- I love you too, Cisco. That’s how I -- that’s what you grabbed onto to open the boundary, me, reaching out for you. Except you didn’t -- _you_ don’t know _me_ , so I can’t expect you to --”

“Stop talking, Harry.” Cisco’s voice came out strangled and trembling. The hand on his heart. The gentle, insistent tugging. The feeling that had no words, except maybe it did, and maybe they were _I do, Ramon, I love you, it’s stupid how much._ “You -- wait. You love me? So much that I felt it across dimensions?”

“Of course,” Harry said, like it was the simplest thing in the world.

Cisco was falling, flying. Jumping to lightspeed. _Breathe through it, Ramon_. “Just like you said you would.” 

Harry inclined his head curiously at that. “Hologram Harry,” Cisco clarified. “He said that you’d feel the same way he did, but I didn’t believe him.”

Harry’s eyes narrowed into that _puzzle you out_ stare that took all of Cisco’s breath and doubt away. “You thought _I_ wouldn’t want _you?_ Why?”

“I don’t know,” Cisco said, taking a tiny step closer just to hear Harry’s breath hitch in his chest, the way he’d known it would. “Something about lightning not striking twice?”

“Idiot.” There was a smile creeping across Harry’s face, wide and dimpled and full of desperate hope. “That’s a myth. Lightning strikes twice all the time.”

“Then I thought you’d be different, maybe.” Cisco drew close enough that he had to tip his head up to keep looking into Harry’s eyes. “But you’re not. You’re still you.”

“I’ve always been me, Cisco.”

“Yeah, but most folks are fine with only having one of themselves. You had to go and duplicate yourself just to stress me out.”

Harry breathed out a chuckle, and the puff of air on his face was the most electrifying thing Cisco had ever felt. “Right. Just to stress you out. Not like my foresight saved the galaxy or anything.”

“Hey now, I think _I’m_ the one who just saved the galaxy.” Cisco grinned at Harry for the first time, or the thousandth, and definitely not the last. “But distinctions aren’t important.” 

The first part of Harry that Cisco learned how to touch was his chest. Softly at first, then firmer, he spread his hand out over Harry’s heart so he could feel it pounding for him. So he could shut up the tiny _this isn’t happening_ part of his brain with a _yes, yes it is, feel that, he’s alive._

Harry, for his part, reached for Cisco’s face like he had so many times before. But this time, he didn’t have to stop himself, and he didn’t flicker away into nothing. Instead, blissfully, gloriously, his fingertips brushed Cisco’s cheeks. Softly at first, tickling the stubble there with feather-light strokes, then firmer, until Harry was cradling Cisco’s head in his hands. Cisco’s eyelids fluttered shut involuntarily when Harry rested their foreheads together. It was ridiculous, really, how hungry he’d been for this, how close he was to doing something irredeemably pathetic like --

But then he looked back up into Harry’s dark-matter-blue eyes, and saw that Harry was already crying. So Cisco didn’t have to feel embarrassed about a goddamn thing.

There was nothing _softly at first_ about it when he kissed Harry. It was fireworks and Cisco surging up on his toes to press closer, galaxies colliding and Harry tangling his fingers tightly in Cisco’s hair. It was like stars exploding, Cisco thought as he learned how Harry tasted and touched and loved him, into the stuff the universe was made of.

\---

(If he’d wanted to, Cisco would have heard Iris sighing happily and Jesse laughing triumphantly. Would have felt Barry looking away with an embarrassed grin and Caitlin rolling her eyes fondly. But he was too busy feeling other things. Time for all that later. No rush.)

\---

Eventually they all wandered away into the branching tunnels in search of soft places to sleep, because despite the crew’s exhilaration at being free, they were all remembering how rough switching dimensions was on a body. And Cisco and Iris and Barry and Caitlin, muscles aching and minds overwhelmed by the _what next_ of it all, agreed that sleeping for a couple weeks before trying to do anything else was the best -- “nay, the _only_ ,” Cisco said -- course of action.

So Cisco gave Iris what he hoped was a _don’t come a-knocking_ look, which she of course understood immediately and returned with a saucy eyebrow wiggle. And Cisco grabbed Harry’s hand, which was just as strong and callused and warm as he’d known it would be, and tugged him away down one of the glowing tunnels.

(Earlier, in a rare moment when his mouth hadn’t been busy kissing Harry’s face, something had occurred to Cisco.

“Do you want to give your crew some kind of rousing victory speech?” he asked, even though he knew the answer.

Harry had grunted. “Absolutely not.”

“Not even a little?” Cisco had said, sliding his hands inside Harry’s jacket. “It would be very sexy. Very Bill Pullman in _Independence Day_.”

Harry’s dimples had deepened teasingly. “If bombastic schlock is what does it for you, Ramon, I have some bad news about me and the way I am --”

“I know.” And Cisco had pulled Harry closer by the waist, and the rare moment was over. “I know you.”)

As soon as Cisco found the perfect little chamber off one of the minor tunnels, one with an extra-cushiony layer of moss on the floor, Harry dragged him inside and pushed him up against the wall. The luminescent moss felt almost warm against Cisco’s back, but Harry felt even warmer as he planted one elbow near Cisco’s head and ran his other hand up his ribs.

“What do you want, Cisco?” he said gruffly, softly, like the words would shatter them both if spoken too insistently. 

“Whatever you got.” Cisco fisted his hands in Harry’s shirt and pulled him down into another supernova kiss. “Could you tell, from over there?” he whispered against Harry’s lips. “Could you tell how bad I wanted --”

Harry moaned into the kiss and pressed closer, so Cisco felt him all over -- heart beating, atoms beating, everything about him beating hot and hard with need. “Wasn’t sure,” he said, and buried his face in the curve of Cisco’s neck. “Couldn’t tell what you were thinking.”

Cisco couldn’t stop the high, trembling sound that came out of him at the feel of Harry’s mouth. “Well, can you --” Harry ran his tongue over the dip above his collarbone, and Cisco gasped -- “ _shit_ , Harry, can you tell now?”

He felt Harry smile, then grind their hips together, then smile even wider when the back of Cisco’s head thumped against the wall. “Might have some idea,” Harry whispered.

That was how Cisco relearned Harry, in that cave on an alien world with the lavender lights pulsing faintly. He learned that Harry was ticklish, which was hilarious, and that he liked having his stupid hair pulled, just a little, just enough to get another one of those growling moans out of him. He learned that Harry was happy to drive Cisco crazy with his mouth, with his fingers, all of him teasing at all of Cisco until he was begging and babbling lovestruck nonsense. And, most of all, he learned that Harry felt _right_ , felt like a movie he could quote from memory, felt like a dream he’d had every night of his --

Cisco’s eyes flew open. “Fuck!”

“What?” Harry looked up, which meant he wasn’t doing that thing with his tongue anymore, but the instant look of concern on his face was so endearing that Cisco couldn’t mind too much. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” Cisco said with a small laugh. He ran his fingers through Harry’s hair. “I just -- I vibed this.”

Harry frowned, even as he leaned into Cisco’s touch. “You -- this? Then how did you not know I was --”

“I thought it was a dream.” Cisco sat up. Harry did, too, but with a grumble. “I thought it was, like, a horny dream that just wouldn’t leave me alone.”

Harry cracked an almost-smile and swept Cisco’s hair out of his face. “Dumbass.”

Cisco swatted Harry’s hand away, but when Harry leaned in to suck at his neck again he tilted his head to give better access. “Sorry I didn’t assume my morning wood was a sign that you were actually pining after me from your interdimensional space prison.”

“I forgive you,” Harry said, his chuckle muffled in Cisco’s skin. He bit softly at his shoulder. “Did you dream this, too?”

“No, this part’s all new,” Cisco said, and he ran his hands down Harry’s back to pull him closer. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y'all. Y'ALL. I know we're not done yet but we're almost there, and I've had parts of this chapter written for months and this feels really big for me, and I hope it was as big as all of you were hoping it would be. And this isn't the end but it will be soon, and I can't express how much all of your support and comments and friendship has meant to me in the process of getting here. Thank you SO much for reading. Tune in next time for the thrilling conclusion <3


	16. The Real World Was Wide

_Reader, I married him._

_Oh God, not literally. That was just a_ Jane Eyre _reference. Whatever. Forget it._

_But we did settle into each other, Ramon and Jesse and me, so quickly that it should have scared me, and would have before everything. Before he saved me. Saved us all. But turns out cohabitation looks a lot less intimidating when you’ve already stared down the end of the universe._

_This mountain is an absolute honeycomb of tunnels and chambers of every size, so it’s been easy to convert into an apartment building of sorts. Ramon and I have a room, with a fire pit and a blanket made of plant fibers and everything. Jesse has one, right across the tunnel, just close enough to call out to Ramon when she has an idea she needs him to bounce back to her, but just far enough away to “maintain her fragile sanity,_ Dad _,” as she says, with a teasing smile at me every time. Snow, and West and Allen, are right around the corner._

_Everyone has a room. Families have what might be called wings. And the ones who came alone, who were ready to dive into this abyss without so much as a familiar hand to hold, they’ve formed their own neighborhood, practically, in the caves surrounding that massive cavern where it all went down. It’s a bit of a non-stop party in there, actually -- always fires burning, always food sizzling away, always happy talk and song echoing around the shadow-blue walls. If you’d asked me before all this whether I’d like to spend my evenings in a cave passing skewers of charred alien meat around to my smelly coworkers, I probably would have thrown the nearest dry-erase marker at you. But all the talking and laughing and sharing feels... necessary. So I let Ramon drag me down there some nights. More and more as time goes on, actually._

_Everyone has been working so hard to make this work. Collecting snow melt, keeping the fires going, cooking and sewing and telling stories. Snow and Hewitt are working around the clock to keep everyone nourished, un-frostbitten, and away from that one type of fungus on the surface that spews noxious spores if you touch it. Allen and Harmon have done a phenomenal job of cataloguing which flora and fauna are safe to eat._

_(I’m partial to the meat of these little scaly things that cling to the walls of the caves with their mouths. Ramon started calling them “sucklizards,” though, and I can’t get him to stop. I wish I could come up with an equally annoying name for those berries he likes that grow on the mountainside and taste like toffee, but he’s always been better at nicknames than me. Plus, they make his lips taste so sweet. So I get distracted, when I try.)_

_It’s almost gratifying, knowing how well the mission would have worked out if -- well, if everything had gone about as differently as it could have gone. But the part of me that wanted this, wanted to be part of the first human colony on an exoplanet, was prepared to live and die here making that dream a reality... that part withered away somewhere between being imprisoned in another dimension and falling in love again._

_Now, I just want to go home. Eat a burger. See Jesse off to college. Get a dog so Ramon can name it Chewie or some shit._

_I know everyone else feels the same. Ramon and West and Snow and Allen, they never signed up for this. And the crew -- they signed up for this, technically. But they’re exhausted. And I wouldn’t be any kind of captain if I let them keep going._

_So we’re going to get home. I don’t know when, and I don’t know how, but my daughter is even smarter than I am and my crew is exceptional and the man I love can tear holes in time and space. We’re going to make it._

_(Yeah, yeah, there was a President Bill Pullman inside me all along. You happy?)_

_(Me too.)_

_(Now go away, you’re distracting me again. I’m almost done, I --)_

_(Mm. God, no, leave. I’ll be there in a minute.)_

_(Yes, Ramon, that’s a promise.)_

_Anyway. The batteries in this thing are dying. Funny how they lasted for ages untold in the Other Place, but the minute I take this stupid watch outside in a snowstorm the power drains. So this is probably my last recording, and that is fine by me. There’s not much reason to narrate my life now that I’m finally living._

_I’ll probably give this to West, to help with the book I know she’s thinking of writing. So, West, if you’re listening: Sorry for all the rambling. And sorry for being such an asshole in the beginning, there. I would ask you to forgive me, but I think -- I’m pretty sure you already have. I think we’re friends. Family. Ramon keeps telling me that’s what we all are, anyway. And I think I finally believe him._

\---

After a while, after a couple weeks of resting, making sure the colony hadn’t escaped the Other Place just to die on Proxima B, and finding out just how many of his dreams he and Harry could turn into reality, Cisco felt ready to reach out again. So he and Harry zipped each other into their coats, and they hiked up the mountain under the rainbow sky.

“Do you really need to be at the peak for this, Ramon?” Harry huffed as they climbed. “You’re not a cell phone.”

“Very astute, Harry.” Cisco’s smiling breath shone reddish in the frozen air. “I can see now why your genius is world-renowned.”

Harry rolled his eyes, and squeezed Cisco’s gloved hand tighter in his own. “So it’s just for the cinematic aesthetics of it all, huh?”

“You know me so well.”

(It was also -- and he didn’t say so because he could tell that Harry knew, without needing to be told -- because Cisco was trying to train himself to appreciate the landscape for how beautiful it was, instead of as the backdrop to some of the worst things that had ever happened to him. The auroras, the sunset, the snow on the purple mountains -- they were, really, beautiful. Romantic, even.)

They reached the summit, and while Harry stretched his knees Cisco tested the waters, so to speak. He’d been able to tell, even without probing it, how much wider his awareness was now, that feeling further and breaching bigger would be nothing after what he’d done in the cavern. But he was still surprised by how easily he fell upward into the universe, how quickly his mind was millions of miles away, skidding along the dark matter filaments until Proxima Centauri was only a speck behind him and the Sun was a speck ahead --

“Whoa.” Cisco collapsed back into himself, which was easy because Harry already had his hands on his shoulders. “Space is big, babe.”

“Very astute.” Harry’s dimples deepened, but his eyes still narrowed into Cisco’s, searching. “How far did you reach?”

“About a third of the way to our solar system, if I had to guess.” Cisco tilted his chin up to meet Harry’s gaze. “Will you do the thing? While I try again?” 

He felt Harry’s grip on him tighten, even through all the layers between them. “You sure?”

“Yeah.” And Cisco stood on his toes to kiss Harry quickly on his cold, chapped lips. “I’m sure.”

So Harry moved around behind him and lowered Cisco’s hood so he could speak, warm and rumbling, in his ear. “You _definitely_ ,” he murmured, his hands landing back on Cisco’s shoulders and his breath puffing cloudy against his cheek, “don’t need me to do this anymore.”

“Maybe,” Cisco said, his skin erupting in goosebumps that had very little to do with the cold. “But I want you to.”

And Harry dropped a smiling kiss just behind his ear, and Cisco let himself fall again, up and away and toward the Sun, toward home --

_“What do you see?”_

_“Nothing, Harry. It’s the vast, uncaring vacuum of space.”_

Harry chuckled, and Cisco felt it in the rippling emptiness around him, lightyears away. _“What do you feel, then, smartass?”_

_“I’m getting closer.”_ Cisco pushed, and the glittering distant stars slid past him even faster. _“Halfway, maybe. I think --”_

_“Keep going, Cisco. You’ve been so far already, just a little farther --”_

the dark matter was rushing all around him, purple and deafening, and his mind was stretching, stretched as far as it would go, like a rubber band starting to break at the tears you hadn’t noticed until it was too late --

“I can’t.” And Cisco fell to his knees, the heavy material of his pants crunching into the snow. “I can’t reach that far, Harry.”

Harry knelt, too, a little stiffly, and kissed Cisco on the forehead. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Ha. You’re funny. You should take that act on the road, that’s how funny --”

“We’ll figure something else out.” Harry looked at him sternly, tiredly, planet-shakingly lovingly. “Now don’t worry about it.”

\---

The colony collectively tried to ignore the truth for a while, but after several weeks in the mountain it became unavoidable: They were going to have to send an expedition to _Providence I._ Barry had collected all the other supplies from their escape pod, but there still weren’t enough coats for more than a small group of people to go outside at a time. Caitlin and Hewitt were desperate to know if any medical supplies had survived the crash. Everyone’s uniforms were getting undeniably rank. And when it became clear (though _hell_ if he told anybody but Harry and Jesse and his friends outright) that Cisco wasn’t going to be able to breach them all home, the crew began to talk. They would probably be able to scavenge some kind of parts, they said. A generator, maybe, or a radio if they were lucky.

(Any radio message would take four years to reach Earth, no one said. And any reply would take four more.)

“Do you want to come, Cisco?” Iris finally asked him, late one night when they were both wiped out from marshaling volunteers, smoking piles of lizard jerky, and teaching Jesse how to use the pulse rifle (because “I’ve barely left the cave in _weeks_ , Dad, I’m _going”_ ).

Cisco thought about twisted metal. Singed scraps of circuitboard. The flight deck, and whether it would still be recognizable as what it had been the last time he’d seen it.

“No,” he said. “But I’ll still go, if you guys need me to breach you.”

Iris took his hand and squeezed. “We’ll be okay. Barry can run us there. Just tell us where to go.”

Harry was going, of course. He was the captain, after all, and Cisco knew he’d never forgive himself if something happened to the expedition and he hadn’t been there. Didn’t mean Cisco had to be happy about it, though.

“Will you send me a postcard?” he said, the night before they were due to set off. He and Harry lay naked on their bed of moss, tangled up in their blankets and each other. The joke in Cisco’s words got lost, somewhat, in the quiet sadness in his voice.

Harry ran his fingers through Cisco’s hair. “We’ll be gone two days at most, Ramon.”

“Still. I better get a souvenir.”

“Oh, of course. I’ll make sure to stop and pick up a tacky magnet on the way back.”

Cisco kissed Harry on his smirking mouth. “I’ll clear a spot on the fridge.”

\---

They were, in fact, gone for three days -- just long enough for Cisco to start conjuring up images of eldritch behemoths that lived under the ice and loved the taste of grad students and snarky astronauts. He spent those days nervously pacing through the caves (he couldn’t even go outside, as the expedition had taken all the parkas) and trying to vibe them from the things they’d left behind. He saw his friends hazily, just enough to take the bite off the sharp-toothed edges of his panic. 

But when they returned, lugging sleds full of medical supplies and capsules of reconstitutable food dust and sacks of every kind of spare part imaginable, Cisco still hugged Barry and Iris and Caitlin like he was allergic to letting go. He still kissed Harry like kissing him would make the universe keep spinning. Harry responded in kind, dropping all the bags he’d been holding, and if Jesse and Caitlin started making gagging sounds at each other behind them, Cisco pretended not to notice.

“I have something for you,” Harry eventually murmured, his voice craggy with the effort of coming up for air.

“You didn’t, like, actually bring me a souvenir, did you?” Cisco watched as Harry rifled through one of the knapsacks at his feet. “I was, and I know this’ll be hard to wrap your head around, _joking_ , though I wouldn’t say no to a shiny rock you found, or --”

Cisco’s words died in his throat as Harry thrust a small, black box into his hands. He turned it over slowly, feeling the fire-roughened titanium under his fingertips.

“What is this, Harry?” he asked, even though he knew the answer.

“Exactly what it looks like.” Harry’s fingers flexed at his sides, like he wanted to touch Cisco but wasn’t sure if he would be welcome. “The _Providence_ ’s black box.”

Cisco swallowed thickly. “So it has -- what, it recorded --”

“It contains all the data generated by the ship’s computer,” Harry whispered. “All of his memories.”

Cisco’s knuckles whitened around the box. He looked up at Harry, who was practically vibrating with uneasiness.

“So he’s alive. In a manner of speaking,” Harry continued around his stuttering breath. “I thought you’d want to know. In case -- in case you --”

Cisco cut off whatever insecurity Harry had been about to choke out with another kiss, tugging him close by the collar of his coat and doing his damnedest to press reassurance into his mouth.

“Thank you for telling me,” he whispered. “Now don’t worry about it.”

Harry exhaled slowly, finally letting his hands drift to Cisco’s sides. “We could bring him back, though. Back on Earth. Recode his program, build a portable projector --”

Cisco shook his head. “I don’t think he’d want to keep being a hologram. Too much angst.” He looked at the box in his hand, making sure not to let go of Harry with the other. “Any way we could build him his own server and just let him, you know, _be?_ ”

One of Harry’s dimples deepened softly. “Travel the virtual world. Solve the Riemann hypothesis. Confirm the Grand Unified Theory.”

“Oh man, yeah, he’d solve all the mysteries of the universe before long. Just like you would if I wasn’t here distracting you with all _this._ ”

Harry snorted, and rested his forehead on Cisco’s. “Right. Though I was thinking we could, I don’t know, maybe -- only if you’re okay with it, obviously --”

“Any day now, Porky Pig.”

“-- we could code you in, too. Give him a Cisco to keep him company.”

Cisco blinked, his throat tightening happily. “Really?”

“Yeah. I think I can say, with a reasonable degree of certainty, that he wouldn’t want to _be_ without a Cisco.”

Cisco lost himself in kissing Harry all over again, and was seriously considering dragging him back to their room to remind him how little he had to be insecure about, when Harry pulled back, eyes wide. 

“Almost forgot,” he muttered, and reached for the bag again. “Found this in the wreckage of the engine room.”

And he held up some kind of gizmo, a cylindrical collection of glass tubes and spark plugs and twisting copper wires. Cisco raised his eyebrows.

“Here’s where you tell me what the hell that thing is, Harry.”

And Harry grinned, in a way that made Cisco suspect that it was okay to hope again. “It’s a Faraday distributor. The part of the engine that amplified the dark energy flow to increase energy output.”

Cisco grabbed Harry by the wrist, his heartbeat accelerating to impossible, interstellar speeds. “So --”

“So with it, we’ll be able to build a device that will amplify the dark matter flow in your body to increase your power.” Harry kissed Cisco on the nose, still smiling. “I’m thinking goggles of some sort would be ideal.”

\---

Cisco couldn’t help but hover as Harry put the finishing touches on the goggles. Because the guts of them were some of the most intricate machinery he’d ever seen, and because he was antsy, and because he still wasn’t tired of watching Harry’s hands as he worked.

“You have to come with me when I breach to Earth.”

“ _If_ you breach to Earth,” Harry said, glancing up at Cisco over the tops of his glasses. “Though your faith in me is appreciated. And you’re right, it will be easier to explain the situation if you have someone recognizable with you.”

Cisco poked Harry in the forehead. “I was going to say that whoever’s on the other side might not be inclined to help me, Cisco Ramon, infamous international space criminal, unless I had the Honorable Captain Wells with me.”

Harry huffed out a laugh, and didn’t look up from the goggles. “I highly doubt you’re _infamous_.”

“Hey, we pulled off the heist of the century, probably --”

“Accidentally.”

“-- but the news channels breathlessly recounting our exploits have no way of knowing that.”

Harry shot him an affectionate glance. “Please. Your mugshot would be too adorable for anyone to take you for a hardened criminal.”

Cisco stuck his tongue out at Harry, just to get the mouth-tightening, pupil-widening look out of him he’d known it would. “Why don’t you redirect all the brainpower you’re using to insult me back toward completing the task at hand --”

“Oh, task completed.” Harry had, indeed, put down the soldering iron and was holding up the finished goggles. “These are ready for a test run.”

“Asshole.” Cisco shoved Harry in the shoulder, and Harry chuckled, and Cisco kissed him quiet. “Test away, then.”

When Harry slid the goggles over his eyes, the universe went quiet. Not silent, just softer, because the buzz of every atom and the hum of every photon weren’t beating at Cisco’s eardrums anymore, distracting him. His awareness had narrowed to the dark matter web -- he could feel the filaments connecting his body to Harry’s, tethering both of them to everyone else in the caverns, flowing from the core of the planet to its surface to its sky to the vastness of space and everything in it -- every galaxy, every star, every planet, including --

Cisco grabbed Harry by the sides of his face and pulled him down into a laughing, sparking, world-turning kiss. If Harry seemed surprised at first, he got over it quickly.

“It’s working?” he whispered.

“Like a charm, baby,” Cisco said. And he punched a hole in the universe, and he pulled Harry through by the collar, following the threads that had always been tugging them towards each other, toward home.

They stumbled out of the breach and into a darkened computer lab. Harry gasped.

“Mission control,” he whispered. And yeah, there was the space agency logo on the wall, and the telltale coffee cups and protein bar wrappers of a team that had been working on a problem they were pretty sure they couldn’t solve, and an enormous screen on the wall full of numbers and words that were dwarfed by one counter:

_Days since launch: 357._

“Oof,” Cisco said. “Almost a year.”

“Yes, yes, relativity blows,” Harry grunted. “We should find --”

But he was cut off by a yelp, a crash, a faint groan. Harry’s eyebrows nearly disappeared into his hair. Cisco spun around, squinting through the rows of desks.

“Hello?” he called out. “Is anyone --”

A head popped up, groundhog-like, from under a desk just a few yards away. It was a kid, probably only a few years younger than Cisco. They had that overworked, over-Red-Bulled intern look that Cisco was very familiar with, and their eyes were wide in the way of someone who was _not_ paid enough to deal single-handedly with what they were seeing --

“Oh shit,” the kid said faintly, pulling themself to their feet, “you’re _Cisco Ramon._ You _stole Providence I._ ”

Cisco turned to Harry, grinning massively, and Harry might have rolled his eyes if they hadn’t been full to bursting with happy tears.

“And you --” the kid blinked, hard -- “you’re, you’re _Harrison Wells_ , but -- but --”

And Cisco laughed, because he was happy and he was home and he was going to get this kid promoted _so hard_ , and he propped an elbow on Harry’s shoulder and said: 

“Yeah, so. Funny story.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh boy. Okay. So not to get emo, but this fic has 
> 
> a) been the driving creative force in my life for over four months
> 
> b) sometimes driven me crazy and most of the time filled me with joy
> 
> c) been the instigator of some truly awesome friendships. Like, before this fandom I never really had internet friends, and now I do, and I care about you guys in ways I never really expected to
> 
> d) become far and away the longest thing I've ever written and FINISHED 
> 
> e) been one of if not THE most fulfilling creative undertakings I've ever worked on
> 
> Thank you all, from the bottom of my heart, for reading and commenting and yelling at me/letting me yell at you on Tumblr. I've always loved writing, but it always seemed like such a solitary, stressful activity; with this fic, though, I had a community, I had support, and I really can't overstate how much that has meant to me. 
> 
> I'm probably going to take a break from writing Harrisco for a little while (because I'm wiped out, and I'm moving soon, and I might pivot to focus on turning the bones of this story into an original work....), but I will obviously not stop devouring YOU GUYSES fics and headcanons and content. Oh, and that first thing was a lie, I will finally be finishing those Valentine's prompts one of these days. Promise.
> 
> If we're not already, be my Tumblr buddy at she-is-the-doctor. Lots of love <3


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